Gregor

GREGOR'S QUALITATIVE LEAP

One morning, when Gregor Samsa woke from troubled dreams, he found himself transformed in his bed into a horrible vermin. He lay on his armour-like back, and if he lifted his head a little he could see his brown belly, slightly domed and divided by arches into stiff sections. The bedding was hardly able to cover it and seemed ready to slide off any moment. His many legs, pitifully thin compared with the size of the rest of him, waved about helplessly as he looked.

“What’s happened to me?” he thought. It wasn’t a dream.

— Metamorphosis, by Franz Kafka [Translated by David Wyllie]

I think of the many occasions in life less important but by no means indifferent to me, when it was a question of making a choice. For although there is only one situation in which either/or has absolute significance, namely, when truth, righteousness and holiness are lined up on one side, and lust and base propensities and obscure passions and perdition on the other; yet, it is always important to choose rightly, even as between things which one may innocently choose, 'it is important to test oneself, lest some day one might have to beat a retreat to the point from which one started, and might have reason to thank God if one had to reproach oneself for nothing worse than a waste of time.

— “Equilibrium Between the Aesthetical and the Ethical in the Commposition of Personality;” from Either/Or by Søren Kierkegaard [Translated by Walter Lowrie]

Gregor straddles the Edge
at the Abyss, trembling
pebbles & shale shards "underfoot"
on the verge of leaping
or crawling back to the ledge
humiliated & forlorn
villagers below mocking his hump
bellowing "jump, jump!"
Gregor notices a tightrope
spanning the Void to cross --
obscured to those hecklers hurling
potatoes, thorny twigs & acorns
he spies his new body
on the other side, hanging
from a pine tree limb
"THIS IS A DREAM!" Gregor
shouts "ONLY DREAMING!"
& waves his thin insect limbs

Marjorie

MARJORIE
the tassel on your red beret
is almost the color of the sky,
the all blue of your eyes
like a newborns. your worn
overcoat loose on you, comfy.
I am straining to resurrect
the intricate details
of our encounter
with twin peaks: the return
streaming on the flatscreen
in the living room
was it El Capitan or Matterhorn?
were you English or French, or
Swiss? the jade broach, the bracelet
gold & rubies, a pearl necklace
& earrings — yes, I’m sure that’s right!
theres no secrets anymore, Marjorie
we have scrapbooks of captioned photos
instead, which is why we know
we shared rosti at a square table
in Zermatt at Alphitta… no — at Allalin
by the fireplace, in Saas-Fee, no —
chocolate cake in Oxford’s Grand Cafe…
we met was on the train from Prince,
clattering through tunnels, around bends
in the New River, en route to DC, Philly
NYC. Upon arrival, we disembarked,
never again to meet, except in my dream
on Labor Day eve, 2026, at 4:38 AM

Stricken Part 3D

D. A Reckoning

A quotation here of Gregory Sholette’s “Twelve notes on collectivism and dark matter,” prefaced by Agamben:
I
“As a set of rules that define the events of discourse, the archive is situated between Langue, as the system of construction of possible sentences––that is, of possibilities of speaking––and the corpus that unites the set of what has been said, the things actually uttered or written. The archive is thus the mass of the non-semantic inscribed in every meaningful discourse as a function of enunciation; it is the dark margin encircling and limiting every concrete act of speech.”
- Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz.
The Witness and the Archive, 144.

II
From every swipe of your plastic debit card to the surveillance of so-called public spaces, an administered collectivity hides everywhere in plain sight. Every ‘I’ conceals an involuntary “belongingness,” every gesture a statistic about your purchasing power, education level, and the market potential of your desire. Effectively we are collectivized already. The only question now is: should we accept this type of involuntarily, serialized collectivity, or actively seek another? This is not merely one strategy to ponder among others. is a fundamental issue at every level of lived experience today within what Giles Deleuze aptly termed the society of control.
— Notes on Dimensional Time [Dissertation Notes 2, part 1]

Face it. For at least half a century the visionary youth have tried valiantly to warn us, to save us, to show us another way. They have been incessantly mocked and, if they managed to persist, brutalized, for their trouble. Naively shouting alarms and naming names, so that the perpetrators of our demise could be rightly defamed, blamed and shamed. Their warnings were met with shrugs, or worse, turned back on them. The Kids identified the malaise, the extent to which liberty has conceded to control. By now, the story is to sad to tell again, because it’s been told and heard. The Occupy experience brought it home to me, finally.

Y’all had a chance.

The young prophets. I wonder if theirs are the souls of those snuffed out in the World Wars, or maybe of all the casualties, of humanity’s innumerable wars, massacres, executions, murders and suicides combined. Plus those felled by pestilence, plagues, starvation, neglect and the endless variety of Samsaric afflictions. Maybe the forgotten gods and the pillaged Earth have quite simply had enough. They’re fed up, pulling the plug, as it were. The clock’s ticking, no pressure. Our supply of second chances, do-overs, intercessions and whatnot are drying up, like the mighty Colorado, and the Salton Sea, or any puddle in the desert sun.

NOTES

Last night I painted my fifth Lefty painting, an ink/watercolor/coffee, loose and gestural, with a few splatters thrown in at the finish. The title, Evening Shadows Fall, comes from a song composed by JP for Par 3, the band of Keyes brothers and an O’Grady who were my posse, during the transition between ND and Jersey City/NYC in ’85-6. They formed the constellation into which my creative comet blazed and spun out. For months I intermittently appeared at the pad on Erie Street, feverishly adding layer upon multimedia layer to a massive 8’ x 24’ drop cloth backdrop for their gigs. The gang worked graveyard at the last gas station before the Holland Tunnel, the most frequently knocked over gas station in all of New Jersey. Par 3 played memorable shows at venues in the City like the Lone Star, which featured a huge fiberglass iguana by “Daddy-O” Bob Wade, whom I’d later meet in Santa Fe. My favorite performance was at Khyber Pass in Philly. The guys wore PJM FunkShunArt, and I did lights (all red) and sound, too — even though I hadn’t a clue how to do it. I recall a visit to the venerable Martin guitar factory, and hand painting with yellow, blue and red auto body paint a custom bass JP had built. The sound it made afterwards was positively Apocalyptic.

The frenetic unraveling of that summer defies chronological narration, probably due to my recent head trauma, and rapidly progressing alcoholic volatility. I careened from one mad situation to the next, increasingly ill-equipped to sort through options logically, to distinguish opportunity from dangerous trap. The Statue of Liberty portrait (on quarter-inch steel, framed with barbed wire and railroad ties), which initially was promising but devolved into a debacle, is a prime example. Another is the FunkShunArt deal I walked away from. I’ll spare you the details, for now, before saying that it required a few years’ sober perspective and effective sponsorship to untangle the mess, with the benefit of hindsight. That phase ended with my squeezed into a hatchback stuffed with luggage, escaping the Rotten Apple with PJ and his girlfriend to Wisconsin and more torrid episodes of ecstasy and deflation and/or debasement. …Geographic from there to South Bend, lightning-hit, road trip with Don, home briefly in very bad condition, then off to Colorado and a pleasant visit to the Keyes family home next to Red Rocks. The Keyes were so kind, my first legit collectors.

I hitched a ride with brother Mike Keyes, who dropped me off in Trinidad, where I had my first bowl of delicious chile rojo, which I did not recognize as chile at all. From there I crossed the border into New Mexico, and spent a few days in a desolate motel, making a set of acrylic and ink paintings on 18” x 12” CS1 paper, pressing two sheets together while the base coat was wet and pulling them apart, a technique I have returned to, more than once. I had a suitcase and a briefcase, containing two pairs of jeans, white tees and jockey briefs, shit-stomper boots, a handful of socks, a black leather Overland Sheepskin leather jacket, RayBan Wayfarers, a big handgun and fifty rounds, a bottle of jack, a journal and a paltry few art supplies, one of dad’s credit cards (which I would abuse) and a few hundred dollars in cash and traveller’s checks.

I boarded a bus for the City Different, where I planned to paint a quadriptych masterpiece called “Man” in the dimensional ratios of the Golden Rectangle. When completed I would donate it to the Chicago Museum of Contemporary Art, thereby launching my excellent fantasy art career to great notices and wide acclaim. Of course it did not quite turn out like that, though my contention to my dad, that I was pursuing a practically superior professional route instead of entering grad school — that I would be paid to learn — turned out to be true, over the next decade! Unfortunately, my insanity voided every good idea and supplanted it with serial ever-worse obnoxiousness.

[Mike Keyes mugging with early original PJM paintings from the Trinidad/Raton series, with letter on FunkShunArt stationery, ca. 1986]

…Time-traveling to the present day, Mike Keyes’ wife Diana shared unprompted several candid snapshots of Mike mugging for the phone camera with two of those early PJM artworks, including an exceedingly rare piece from the Raton series. Which I suppose was the catalyst for our looping back to that fateful summer of ’86.

On another thread, I came across Brent Stewart’s short 8mm film for DDDD’s Sirens + Conflagrations installation project at Cheekwood Museum in Nashville, in the short-lived Frist-funded contemporary art stables conversion. The piece featured the amazing ballerina Nicole Koenig as the Siren, an incredible original musical composition by Sharon Gilchrist with vocals by the superb Rebecca Stout and post-/production by vaunted AV house Ground Zero on Music Row and East Nashville’s legendary Woodbine Studio’s Bob Solomon! WOW! We were COOKING! The Sirens theme in our first major DDDD project dovetails nicely with our current revenant myth Ulysses content seam…

Original David Lynch script, Lost Highways

Finally, in the background, I’ve been bouncing from David Lynch movie and TV projects through a few notable non-sequitur media and cinematic detours. In the DL Universe, I am rewatching episodes of the original Twin Peaks (first season) and TP: The Return; and have been watching Wild at Heart about twenty minutes at a time. …Shocking, sexy, bizarre, stupefying and utterly eccentric, these programs can be tough to watch. They are, in one respect, in 2026, out of synch with everything else on Roku. Yet, I find them to be strangely, hilariously funny at times, even if the humor is awkward or queasy. Indeed, I think Lynch’s achievements are all the more impressive when factoring in the nebulous criteria for American artistic greatness. He’s a giant, compared to what, or whom? [Again, the evaluation must acknowledge that today’s Hollywood is a hollowed out shell and shadow its former iterations, an industrial wasteland. The romance is long gone, and screen idols are mostly CGI-enhanced fabrications.]

…And how about that glorious ethereal Lynchian muse Agent Tammy/Chystabell! I Tracked down “Bird of Flames,”an absolutely spellbinding music video DL made with her (directed by Chel White), which I’ll share here. The dreaminess echoes both the otherworldly red-curtain/black & white floor scenes and the tres-cool club-music performances in Peaks and a bunch of the films. Lynch was so coy about his mystery mind, but overt about the instinctual or animal forces lurking in the shadows of his visionary imagination. Seriously, I keep wondering, What does it all mean? For instance: What is the Log Lady, and, more precisely, why is she? Who knows? —now that the irascible artist and auteur is gone beyond, I don’t expect or even want a recursive answer. I do value authorial ambivalence, and dodging lowest-common-denominator critique. DL embraces the contradictions that proliferate in the American culture wherein his complex, convoluted and unconventional stories are situated…Am I wrong to suggest the oeuvre is mostly apolitical?

Speaking of politics and disturbing film, a Stricken honorable mention goes to Scorcese’s Taxi Driver, whose final furious sequence still hits like a ton of blood-soaked lead cinderblocks. The opening and closing sequences are breathtaking, with the saturated colors, choppy cuts, abstracting of time and structure, a brilliant example of dimensionist filmmaking. The soundtrack complements the visuals effectively, conforming emotionally with the story. Biddle’s flirtation with assassination and incremental descent into street violence and vigilantism tracks with the increasingly dangerous status quo for the country’s political discourse. Again, the health of the free speech environment determines whether or not representative democracy functions as such, or fails. Add on the corruption attaching to unfettered moneyed investment in molding opinion/consent, and the subversion of meaning accomplished through virtual influencing campaigns. Informed citizenship is instead deformed and in effect negated. How else to explain that on a range of issues most important to voters, their representative repeatedly fail to legislate on behalf of their constituencies? And how much longer before Luigis organize to act (which of course explains the vast expansion of America’s security, enforcement, surveillance and prison apparatus, in service of the authoritarian, oligarchic elites and the monopolization of the means to justify this through mass media)?

Ideas surrender to weaponized ideology, which ultimately concedes to impulsive command and control. Beyond this, as a society barely recognizable as such, spectacle — military parades, sporting events or concerts in coliseums, rallies and revivals — codifies and consolidates elite power. Trump’s vain obsessions with monumentalizing and spraying his name across the Capitol (and everywhere) is simply an extension of lifelong approach in real estate and product branding. In his worldview, even the signature must be run more like a business. His cronies get the joke, since one of the linchpins in rigging the system is cleverly hiding operational intent and action from scrutiny and accountability. Ruthless and anti-democratic management practices are usually offset by squeaky clean CSR public-facing appearances. POTUS 45/47 breaks the rules, which tickles his base, and amuses the superrich, who despise everyone, more or less, but themselves.

Which brings me to the question of passion. Last week, I sniffed around Cassavetes, whom I admire tremendously for his well-documented, seemingly boundless passions, but I couldn’t manage more than a few minutes in any of several of his classic films, for some reason. The booze, cigarettes, flawed characters, jittery camera work, lightly scripted dialogue I’ve previously found charming, are too depressing and not at all entertaining in 2026. Decades after the fact, it’s a drag to think about how thoroughly the aspirations of the bottom-up creative class has been oppressed and undermined by the greed and predatory menace of their overlords, who are suspicious of anything other than safe, sanitized and decontextualized content.

So, shout-out to Welles (Touch of Evil), Sophia Loren and Marcello Mastroianni (Yesterday, Today and Tomorrow), and Jarmusch again (Night on Earth), and all those who insist on straining against the superimposed boundaries of conformity, complicity and convention. The perils are no joke. And that brought to my mind a recognition of the immense power of the content platforms to systematically render unfavored intellectual property irrelevant, inaccessible, to disappear it essentially, to erase it. To shape history. Not in the clumsy, brutish, clownish ways of the Trump administration (see Smithsonian, et al.), but in the manner of best corporate practices, as conducted by the contractor scrubbers who have flourished in the private sector since the 80s. The sector has on a ridiculously truncated timeline radically improved its capabilities, thanks to an outrageously huge inundation of dark money and assets, the fascistic blending of public and private intel technology, and the massive wetware buildup necessary for all-level implementation.

Weird revelation: old movies feel more real than most of “reality” these days; once it’s in the can, it’s a wrap, except for the rare director’s cut. My neurodivergent mind struggles to grasp the shift in the visionary, virtual topology, at the borders of perception and interpretation. Which brings us round again to Constant Dullaart. A visit to his website and review of his latest AI-powered projects impressed and disconcerted in equal measure. His trolling of Adam Curtis in the Patina Machine series of videos reminded me of my circa Y2K fascination with photographic artifacts, digitized specks, scratches and splatters, pixelization and other intended imperfections I thought would humanize or warm the cold 01 mediums. Dullaart reverse engineers the anthropomorphizing of the machine to grease its unreal wheels and burn the uncanny bridges of hyper-normalization in the process/-ing of our imaginary commons.

PLATES

AFH Beta Website Design (@2001-2)

[Notes from AFH Flickr]: A second beta test, with much more graphic, visual content-rich, image-heavy approach. I really loved this site design at the time. I forget why this one was scrapped. I think it was because I didn't like the navigation through image galleries, and didn't like the lo-res effects of pixillation on the artwork. The bandwidth/image size then was tiny compared to now. Fast was 56k. Super fast was T1 or -3.

Evening Shadows Fall

west winds rustle the leaves and grasses
— we, nestled, embrace by the oak tree
behind your father’s cottage, in autumn
chill & solemn mist, a sad hush about us
: before dawn, I’ll be leaving Killiechronan
for Oban & Tobermory to cross the ocean
to America… so wipe your eyes, hold me
close — sure, I’ll be writing every chance
I get & I’ll send for you from Boston or
Carolina as soon as there’s work… we’ll
dance across the threshold of our new
house made of good wood and brick
a fire in the hearth to keep the babies
warm, meatty stew & milk… Draw down
for now your veil and shawl, for all those
prayers will be answered by springtime
set aside those fears for our future
of dreams, a new world, a new life;
your poor mother’s prayers answered
to the West & freedom by our own hand
[& God’s]

hóčhoka

oyate
…when you reflect on your life
what will you think of first? what
was the best thing you did?
: remember the songs, the inipi
wi-n wacipi songs we sang, how
happy you felt finally, home?
the third day of the third year
…he closed the door behind you
wrapped the Pendleton blanket
over your shoulders, sage tied
with strips of red cloth to the pipestem.
…you told us we had to be prepared to die,
which takes the fear away, which is true
: ties and flags; clouds wind sun/ moon
[sky] black, red, yellow white green blue…
tobacco, wakhalyape — steam, smoke
after finishing your commitment,
nothing impossible possible again
— the safest place in the world;
[earth] big hands & feet, eyes
laughing; the drum and tipi
dancing, the Red Road, thunder
…on winter mornings I still feel
the first one in my bones, & see
their faces in my dreams (as fire)
: drinking water from the gourd…
the buffalo skull, sweetgrass burns
on the glowing coals, the stones
cleanse and purify; then feasting —
never two the same… the willows
spirit plate, all related, me grateful
he called you Strong Singer ____
: it seems long ago [only yesterday]
brothers, 7 sisters — stars at night.

Stricken Part 3C

C. True Time & the Event

Heidegger, in Time and Being (p. 15/26):

…We already heard: In the approaching of what is no longer present and even in the present itself, there always plays a kind of approach and bringing about, that is, a kind of presencing. We cannot attribute the presencing to be thus thought to one of the three dimensions of time, to the present, which would seem obvious. Rather, the unity of time’s three dimensions consists in the interplay of each toward each. This interplay proves to be the great extending, playing in the very heart of time, the fourth dimension, so to speak – not only so to speak, but in the nature of the matter.
True time is four-dimensional.
But the dimension we call the fourth in our count is, in the nature of the matter, the first, that is, the giving that determines all.

So far, I’ve barely delved into music and poetry, but they both figure prominently in the topographical or hemispheric accounting of my stricken reminiscence. To give them their due we ought to first explore concentricity specifically and sonic phenomena generally. Which entails the commingling of disciplines and domains, the boundaries between which are blurred in the post-contemporary era. [I attribute this to the unavoidable flattening effect, lossiness and/or compression inherent in advanced computer processing. But also to copy/paste-itis, and the theoretical infinite resampling and-mixing potential of (quantumized) computing.]

I wrote about concentricity as it pertained to the Occupy movement and much more in a Brooklyn Rail essay in 2011. “Lossiness” is a reference to Claude Shannon’s groundbreaking Rate-distortion Theory, which addresses “lossy effects.” My creative interests, especially in 4th Dimensional aesthetics, theory + technique, have from early on been situated at the intersection of art and science. As a 20th/21st Century American artist, I also advocate for an artist life that integrates the political and social practices with pragmatic, informed positions and interactions with the economic forces and dynamics that impact us all these pursuits.

Shannon’s Theseus Maze in MIT Museum, by Daderot/Wikipedia

Poetics and song are binding agents, the glue, if you will, that reach the mind/spirit and body through alternate channels, let’s say, through circuitous means. My generation of artists has come to art by and large indirectly, and been party over time to the utter hollowing out of defined art, which now is popularly thought to be entirely subjective. A mutable or fungible blend of image, brand, experience, timeliness and currency. This de-definition informs the Big A art world, which however runs on the traditional transactional exchanges, i.e., money, power, prestige, property, sex, etc.

John Dewey at the University of Chicago in 1902 by Eva Watson-Schütze

John Dewey and others tried to establish a rational education-based pathway for ambitious artsies to achieve excellence, while benefitting their communities, as a component of comprehensive democratized academic model. Unfortunately, their early 20th Century successes have been matched and exceeded by a privileged elite who are loathe to surrender their stranglehold on cultural funding, or largesse. America’s apportioning of funds for public education has long been a target of the elites who fear a well-informed and civically active electorate. Privatization of the academic sector has been carried out and is followed by the establishment of an institutional bias favorable to the neo-oligarchy and its strange coalition. Parallel to their rise we have an opposition movement that has embedded itself in the cultural fabric with vigor and tenacity, which has promoted intolerance as frightful across the affected media and organizational domain. The overall effect has been the cultural commons devolution into an extremely polarized, dwindling free speech zone and arena of ideas. In this chaotic environment, artists have had to figure out how to navigate the minefield of favor and disfavor to make work, present and sell it, and cultivate any unconditioned conversation around their enterprise. This grotesque, existential juggling act is one of the central preoccupations of any American cultural professional. Whether your calling is visual, language-based, musical, philosophical, history-centered — teachers and researchers in any of the Humanities have it bad — you must face the radicalized armies and dedicated operations of culture warriors.

Television flattened our perception of events, even as the radio encouraged our bodies to groove in private, then in public. Vietnam and the Kennedy/King assassinations were game changers (even though the mass media phenomenon has deeper, even ancient, roots, e.g., in the Church’s or Nazi propaganda machine, or the execution of outspoken political, economic or religious dissidents, a practice as old as human history). We (a generic convocation of enlightened dimensionist thinkers) abruptly realized the ideological, dogmatic or esoteric logic we started with would not suffice in our pursuit of an immediate real-world solution, nor even compensatory, composite secondary, progressive proposals, as we drifted through overlapping dimensions of knowledge and experience. Despite the visceral tangibility of our emotional reactions to streams of mediated content, we had to wake up to the fact we are physically separated by distance and time from the event that is disturbing or elevating us. And that after repeated exposure, we develop an intense, irrational craving for the weird gratification produced by these (usually angry, sappy, sexy, moody, funny, nostalgic, patriotic or violent) multimedia juice packets. Anxiety or depression has proliferated in an increasingly isolationist populace that has become addicted to the overstimulation electronic network devices beam into our homes, workplaces, school, cars. The laptops, smart phone, tablets, watches and glasses attached the content feed, the data stream, then our bodies, before most of us discerned the informatics loop to which we had become attached, are the product of industry dedicated to manufactured consent and surveillance of its subjects, which it wants to be EVERYONE. We ARE not only receivers. We are transmitters. We are speeding toward being a cyborg nation.

Mike Brewster, Geoff Corder, Shane Kennedy, AFH Gallery Chinatown (2007)

Cue Radiohead and Mark Leckey. In music we have the jam. In poetics we have the slam. In the connective tissue of both we have sound art [RIP, Michael Brewster] and light art {RIP Stephen Antonakos and Dan Flavin}. Frequency, wavelength, and nonverbal sensory perception are pertinent to both arts, of course, though to explain how they pertain we have to deal with different branches of science, their divergent terminology and representational constructs. Neither counting machines or the scientific method has satisfactorily answered the simple question, Why does that make me feel ______? Boy, they’re spending billions trying! “Did ya ever wonder why…?” [RIP Andy Rooney and 60 Minutes, again, too] is a mantra of the inquisitive mind and foundation principle of the scientific method. Why is also the guttural cry anyone facing tragedy, peril, horror, sickness, breakdown — or any Samsaric awfulness. Survival sometimes entails casting aside the Why and grabbing the How To tools. So, in the mid-2010s, post-Occupy, -Bernie, and Trump’s victory, I resolved to chart a new direction, entering a completion phase of practice that became the VyNIL Cycle.

Similarly, since the stroke, I am of necessity in a constant revisionist, How To mindframe. Relearning the Hows of functionality is tempered by a longing beyond the utilitarian procedural. Art and the Word have been my life’s calling, my vocation. Poetry post-stroke has seemed beyond me, and I don’t have the stamina for music […or so I believed, until a few days ago, when I composed what I thought was some pretty respectable verse, and I started pre-production brainstorming with my old pal Wilson]. The stroke fried that part of the brain, evidently, until it hadn’t. Passively, I do enjoy listening to Lachlan’s (Drake-heavy) playlist in the car, as we drive around the Bay Area between hoops tryouts, games and practices. My favorite parts of the commute are the bridges. Lach and his mom went to a J. Cole concert Sunday with my blessing. I didn’t have a clue who J. Cole is, and can’t imagine being in the crowd for one of his performances, wheelchair-bound. My recognition of liminal realism has become pronounced.

At night in my noisy adjustable bed I dream of strolling through the ruins of war torn European cities, or organizing elaborate picnics with Renoir’s opulent, buttery bathers, and exchanging pleasantries with Seurat’s shimmery silhouettes, or reeling and weaving among monuments in a succession of Irish and Scottish cemeteries with rowdy cousins and uncles. Not to be crass, periodically I rendezvous with dream lovers, and the sets are fabulous, the energy is frantic. I play a character that’s an amalgamation or synthesis of Guido in 8 1/2, Ricky in Tie Me Up! Tie Me Down! and Jeffrey in Blue Velvet. [Full Disclosure: The last two sentences of the preceding paragraph were AI-assisted — NOT.] I wake up and am fine, until I move. This morning, dozing, I was doing a two-man show in gallery run by my friend Sean Gaulager of Austin’s CoLab, with my beloved ND professor Don Vogl. He was sporting a sparkly gold lamé NFL jacket

The stroke, unsurprisingly, has me pondering the question of art’s memorializing value. I love Gerhart Richter’s Uncle Rudi. Art, in its most utilitarian iterations, memorializes persons, places, things. The degree to which the art memorial succeeds is dependent on whether the artist’s evocation of the subject does not diminish or minimize our fraught and pointless bargain with imperious finitude. With respect to Death, we want to look away, but can’t help ourselves, and artists tend to maximize that tension. I’m thinking of Michelangelo’s Pieta. Where does art and faith and stone start and stop? Is the art/memorial about the subject’s passing, shaping the memory, defining meaningful achievement, living with Death’s inevitability, a demonstration of acceptance or confrontation, or with its negation through Resurrection? [the Catholic doctrine and Michelangelo’s positions are clear] Maybe it’s just something we have learned to offset or transform grief, a How To tool. The artistic memorial contradicts death, because art is essentially the embodiment of death’s absence. A commemoration ritualizes our processing of mortality, e.g., as procession, dance, eulogy, song, slideshow, etc.; as an Event, another How To tool. Depending on the culture, this expression of grief can involve cutting, burning, sacrifice. Whether we show up as witnesses to the memorial/commemoration, or as participants, performance distances us from the commemorated subject (Death), a ratification of our living through dying, or passing, to use the euphemism. The commemorating ceremony enables the community to distribute solace to mourners.

[An interlude, with Wim Wenders; I had come across a reel in one of the feeds, in which the famed director mordantly commented on how much Berlin had changed since WoD was filmed; which meshes nicely with the subtext of this post, i.e., that the accelerated pace and breadth of proto-civilizational change undermines memorialization, which extends to photography, film and, essentially, symbolic representation in its various mediated formats; and also the post-media practices that land under the banner of editing, including curation, assemblage, collage and so on, in the post-digital era of perpetual options for revision.]

Song, movement, speech, et al., touch the heart through different circuits than stone and pigment on a substrate other than animated flesh. Static or moving image is a secondhand experiential medium, and inadequate to the task, dividing the labor between maker and viewer, except as a complement to commemorating ritualization, when it serves as enhancing decoration, or an element of setting; and that holds for pixel-based content, and all such dead or never-alive stuff. Holography might work, actually might be awesome, but hardly anyone knows how to use it. Again, the tech giants are on it, and have been workshopping/mass testing the concept, with sometimes astonishing (cringe) results. [See Hatsune Miku, and Virtual Popstar] More to the point — and this is an Orson Welles War of the Worlds panic-inducing broadcast type of potentiality — given AI, how susceptible are we to a completely fabricated mass tragedy, which could in turn trigger a reaction with cataclysmic consequences?

A monument embodies (incorporates) the iconically rooted past imaginary. Its depicted subject becomes the passenger in a conceptual time machine, forward-pointed. The idolization of someone or some thing happens at the nexus of fact and fiction, though its dimensional presences inhabit the Now. Ceremonial dance/music/lyrics reunite the past with the present, substantiating memory in the continuum — in time, converted through ritual into a simulation state, invoking an imaginary infinite, a simulacrum. Belief or the suspension of it enables the requisite feedback loop to reproduce the subject, perpetuating its aura, the pretense of authenticity. All cultural reproduction maintains the believability of the subject, whether the underlying narrative is mythological, or even an outright falsehood. The objectified subject represents our childish wish for deathlessness.

If we are to survive with humanity we must differentiate between a totem and a gravestone. Art revolves around the core of values and meaning from which it emerges. The aesthetic kernel is contained in a coded collective instinct. It is re-performed, instantiated through generational repetition, which is patterned generative action. It is a way for subject and object to merge, and for us to submerge in union with both. I’m recalling the beating drum at Lakota Sundances in South Dakota, and feast days at Santa Domingo Pueblo. What secular spectacles meaningfully correlate and mimic the tribal precursor? Can you afford a ticket (to paradise) in 2026? To the Super Bowl or World Cup? To a Taylor Swift concert? If so, our de-memorialized and -sacralized heritage goes the way of the near-extinct ecology of the salmon tribe, of fish and men. Seen through the lens of our 4D analysis, a mob tearing down statues is not shocking at all, but a sign of temporal decoupling. The symbolic village well is poisoned, our covenant with the universal is crumbling, and we all can feel it, like crazed animals before the tempest, howling, running, hiding. Premonition is no protection; Oracle 2026 and the Greek version have more in common than one cares to admit. Burning Man as a secularized, New Age replacement will not cut it either, bro. Grover Norquist should be dead giveaway.

If there is an upside to the grim outlook outlined above, it redounds phenomenologically in what I will call the neo-aura (emphatically not Benjamin’s aura, or maybe its descendent; or did Walter notice it first through his language fixation and other biases, and we misapprehend the symptomatic chronology of apocalypse?), an extrasensory halo accentuating the everyday Beautiful and fragile Miraculous. Think Spielberg’s use of color in Schindler’s List, but subtler, oblique, out of the corner of your mind’s eye, fleeting, a glimpse and it’s vanished. A flickering at the edge of our sensual spectrum, unrecognizable, its thingness obstructed by too conventional perception, obscured by prosaic associations, just another JPEG sunset, which happens to be analog mankind’s last, remembered beforehand. …Pre-remembering what we hold most precious, what we revere, that which imbues a thing with a special light-adjacent energetic, a vibration of vitality in the midst of mortal maelstrom. MEANING. Which is why I adore Angelicism/Film01 so much. We are pre-mourning the End, When the Music’s Over, before we turn out the lights. Jim Morrison and the Doors deserve their reckoning, which is ours, too.

PLATES

BlueBridges (Pittsburgh, 2001)
The Bear (LA Natural History Museum, 2009)
Cali Shack with Windmills (2005)
From Eureka! (The Cabin) 2005
Wooden Poem Book, Scottish series, Original photo by Diane Barrie (1996)
A Prayer for Clean Water (2005)
A Prayer for Clean Water (2005)
Tipi (1998)

Stricken Part 3B

B. Metamorphosis

[In the absurdity, the abject folly of endeavoring to meaningfully art (verb) in 2026, can we propose an engagement with the persistent matrix of controls erected to foil the human urge to expressive liberation?]

I have already come to appreciate the treacherous and false promises peddled by Trump, and the fanaticism his cynical metaphysical snake oil engenders, even now, among MAGAns. To be perfectly clear (every politico and talking head utilizes this phraseology lately): it’s way bigger than them Deplorables; the USA has MEGA troubles, of which MAGA is but one, better understood for revealing structural disintegration, i.e., like a crack in a dam. Our crisis, as plenty of critical observers have attested, is the agreement on fact, truth, meaning, cause, and effect, which in turn instigates a crisis in accountability equality, or justice. Therefore, evildoers blatantly do evil, without retribution. Grifters sack the commonwealth. Gougers plunder. What you spend buys less. The sociopathic so-called Winners flaunt their bloody impunity publicly, to rub the nose of the hoi polloi in it. Any dissent is met with jackboots, persecution (judicial or extra-judicial), and blacklisting.

[You are curious: How can art be decoupled from Power, after three millennia (pretend you know nothing about the WPA, AIA programs, or the countless aesthetic insurgencies, big and small)? What alternative could possibly match the philanthropy and patronage of the Medicis, history’s emperors, the Church, or the Waltons, et al.?]

The intimidation warps the free speech ecosystem. It degrades our best means for maintaining system integrity, which is vital for preventing violent overreactions when conflicts of interest arise, as they will, inevitably, in a free society that encourages competition over the common good. Do you remember when cable sold itself as the commercial-free alternative to the networks, which were cheap or cost nothing [RIP PBS]? Do you realize how polluted our home entertainment programming is today? This is true of the Internet, too, exponentially so on the main platforms, and I won’t even begin to address the problems with the news, the press, journalism. We are witnessing an extinction-level destruction of public free thought and expression, which has everything to do with the collapse of our institutions and rise to unimaginable power of the neo-oligarchs and authoritarians, and the success of their neo-feudalism, -fascist, and -colonialist projects.

[Is the artist’s mission to glorify, to capture the sublime, to idealize what worldliness obscures, to encourage human divinity? Or is the subjective personhood the fixation to which art must be oriented? Or — and it is subversion to even speculate on this — does art and artist insist on a third way, that may or may not be synthetic?]

Again, why should we have even a little confidence in artistic production as a remedy for worldly ills? Fair enough question, that, from an historically accurate POV. More people by far trust prayer to counterbalance the widespread desolation and devastation. Further, art has as a discipline more often than not been co-opted in service of power. Artists who refuse to conform have been shunned, punished and worse — stripped of their artistic means and access to their audience, patronage and place in historical record, as such. The root of the dilemma is Who decides which art and artists make it, and which don’t, and why? In a democracy, the people would choose, but good choices are supported by good education, in a context typified by security, stability and general well-being, It’s hard to care about art on an empty stomach, when you’re battered and bruised, afraid of being snatched or not having a roof over your head at night, or your kid’s sick and you can’t pay for medicine, and so on. Under authoritarian rule, art’s what the ruler says it is, full stop, or else. That rule applies for post-revolutionary and radical fundamentalist religious authoritarians, too. It starts with hard and soft revisionist censorship and morphs into desecration and campaigns to excise and destroy offending art and artists, plus their advocates, by all available means. We have an abundance of historical examples, supplemented by oodles of documentation. We should have corrected this flaw in human development by now, yes? The intercontinental, cross-cultural prevalence of free expression should be spreading like smoke plumes from Canadian forest fires!

[Is the artist a shaman, and art a contemporary secular religion? Is greatness in art a sign of singular genius? Or is art simply labor, cultural production, which ought to be demystified? Is art craft, social construct, a discipline, a language, symbolic? Could art be just another con? Does it boil down to who you know or sleep with, good timing, luck, synchronicity? Do you suspect that none of this is true, exactly, but all of it is plausible?]

Remember when the World Wide Web’s promise was to connect us, foster tolerance, understanding and appreciation across borders and time? Instead we live in Big Brother’s techno-Panopticon, increasingly incapable of discerning between deep-fakes and original objects. Thought, being, nature are mechanically swapped with nightmarish hallucinations, with hellish turpitude and nausea. The web is bifurcated between a pertly decorated and colorized fantasia doubling as the Mall Banal, and a serial killer’s Breugelesque flipbook, a la Se7en. Reality itself has been thoroughly destabilized, in a moment when hyper-attentive realism and practicality arguably have never been so important! Instead, we are flailing in a vortex of malignant narcissism, exposed to randomized outbreaks of unhinged fury and brutality.

[What if I told you art thrives through misfortune. It goes underground, like Moore’s Londoners sheltering in the tube. Art has a subterranean stage, like locusts? Are you skeptical?]

Those who can afford to invest in escapism, diversion and distraction. Noise reduction, sensory deprivation, affirmation and all manner of internal and external compensation is employed to reduce exposure to uncertainty and the associated distress. Supplying the demand for respite is the mission for a massive industrial sector, with its own marketing norms and aesthetics, demographics, celebrities, platforms, distribution channels, lobbyists, etc. Comfort is not a reward to be earned by consistent effort, in a fair system based on meritorious performance over time. That ideal is dead, and chunks of the population art opting out, preferring, as Pink Floyd so aptly put it, to be comfortably numb. The goal of retirement after a long and productive career is hardly viable. Homelessness is as likely as home ownership. We change locations and affiliations like socks. Bargain hunting entails browsing Amazon via Google or an excursion to a big box outlet store.

[Was art your favorite subject in school? What is the first artwork you remember seeing? What did it feel like? Is there art in your dreams? Color?]

Monopolistic corporate consumption of the economy reduces one’s options for all goods and services to a few clicks or one-stop shopping. Which allows one to pursue extreme fitness, indulge in dietary suprematism and other sorts of body modification. The Botox face is a grotesque signifier of ideology and class. Which can be interpreted as a hubristic rebuttal of the privileged, disturbed by the outcry for greater affordability of staples for a majority of Americans who subsist, paycheck to paycheck. Personally, I’m equally fascinated and repulsed by the profuse rationalization and hypocrisy endemic to the Self industry. It is the story of Freudian psychotherapy metastasizing over a century, aided by gross commercialization and mass media. I don’t mind repeating myself. At the end, Cormac proved his genius. He weaved it all together: the Bomb; the asylum; oil bidness; secret agents; gold treasure; incest; math and philosophy; suicide and lonely expatriot-ism. I doubt the movie will ever get made.

[Does a child know what to do, when you put a box of crayons on the floor, and some paper? What about rocks, sticks, water and sand, seashells and peacock feathers, dried flowers, pine cones or autumn leaves…palm fronds, bones?]

Tommy (shadowboxing) series, #16-37 [2002]

Lefty No. 4

I desire to contemplate him from this point of view - this premise: that he was not made for any useful purpose, for the reason that he hasn’t served any; that he was most likely not even made intentionally; and that his working himself up out of the oyster bed to his present position was probably matter of surprise and regret to the Creator.
****
For his history in all climes, all ages and all circumstances, furnishes oceans and continents of proof that of all the creatures that were made he is the most detestable. Of the entire brood he is the only one - the solitary one - that possesses malice. That is the basest of all instincts, passions, vices - the most hateful. That one thing puts him below the rats, the grubs, the trichinae. He is the only creature that inflicts pain for sport, knowing to be pain. But if the cat knows she is inflicting pain when she plays with the frightened mouse, then we must make an exception here; we must grant that in one detail man is the moral peer of the cat. All creatures kill - there seems to be no exception; but of the whole list, man is the only one that kills for fun; he is the only one that kills in malice, the only one that kills for revenge. Also - in all the list he is the only creature that has a nasty mind….
Consider that first mentioned lie: that there is such a thing in the world as independence; that it exists in individuals, that it exists in bodies of men. Surely if anything is proven, by whole oceans and continents of evidence, it is that the quality of independence was almost wholly left out of the human race. The scattering exceptions to the rule only emphasize it, light it up, make it glare.
~ “The Character of Man,” Autobiography of Mark Twain

[Quotation extracted from AFH 2011: Notes on Dimensional Time, Dissertation Notes 2]

The Gift + A Proposal

The Gift + A Proposal
We three in the twilight
strolled to the overlook,
Stepping through shadow,
below Ursa, big & small.
.
His hand is in his pocket,
a brown speckled pebble in his palm,
from the blooming summer garden
behind their cozy blue house.
She sways in the winds sighing,
my eye fixed on the grasses swaying
in the valley. A hymn on her lips
of longing, undone by circumstance.
Wolves sing before the moonrise,
from a mountaintop, or uncanny wood
as deer breath gathers first
over the fraught and foamy creek,
it hovers then drifts, their companion
overnight til dawn. Fragrances
releasing, like rose pedals
from the wilted flower.
Our familiar tapered whispers
mingle with the birdsong,
a twig snapping, crickets chirp,
dewdrops...
Look! They cry out: a compact is signed
in air, not ink. Tomorrow is Today —
I am witness. The gift accepted,
a promise made.
[Only the young should try this way,
daring to surprise Fate and Destiny
with a dance, by Chance or Choice —
Art in Death’s defiance, born again.]

Stricken Part 3A

PART 3

A. Temporal Syncopation

***
He is hung over. Upside down. Living, if you can call it that, in an apartment in Gypsy Alley. A stone’s throw from the tavern. He perceives this to be his ego’s suicide note, these mad scratchings on the adobe walls, behind his paintings. He mashes his cigarettes out on the tile floor. He hangs dead birds from the vigas. He is possessed by a desperate urge to leave something behind: a map for a tracker who’ll hunt down his soul. who’ll rescue him from this wasteland.
[Deadlines Lifelines, p.1]

I have scanned the virtual horizon for clues to explain the 2026 zeitgeist, and the incessant feedback portends a novel type of entropy, symptomatic of cascading nodal overload. What befell the optimism, the faith in democracy alive in my youth? We the people, and the nation we put together to pursue happiness, are #maxxed to the hilt. We suspect the tattered state of the union didn’t just materialize. It’s by design. Vietnam, the dread of nuclear war, the collapse of the labor movement, the resurgence of the globalist 1%, AIDS, the consolidation of media, the rapacious financialization of American society, drugs, culture wars, offshoring, bad tax policy/austerity, attacks on the safety net, public education, consolidation of media, expansion of the inequitable penal system and tech-empowered total surveillance state, erasure of the commons, polarization of civics, the impunity of Big Pharma/Oil/Ag, and, of course the ascension of the Net, especially 2.0… Dimensional analysis permits us to inspect all of these contributing factors individually, like particles, in patterned combinations, like wave forms, or as energy flow with compounding material and nonessential effects. For me the methodology skews in favor of art over science. However, basic dimensionist principles are widely adapted to many research-driven fields, e.g.,sociology, demographics and datamining, with countless applications for generating profiles and measuring impacts, trends, efficiency, waste, productivity and consumption. So, what do I believe had the most deleterious effect on America? Why, the incremental, relentless corruption and debasement of free speech/expression in this country, which is exemplified by the Citizen’s United SCOTUS decision.

As an artist, albeit a stricken one, I strive to meet the moment via the roundabout logic of plastic actualization. What do I mean by that? I imagine a solution of one part Ruskin, two parts McLuhan, a quarter cup of Baudrillard, bring it to a simmer, folding in and basting a melange of my favorite art heroes, seasoned to taste with the salt and peppery memories and imaginings that roll across the screen of my inner eye. My brain is doing cartwheels, figuring out the path out of this or that creative wilderness, minefield or landfill — I can’t decide which to call it. A logistical morass and miasma, akin to a quasi-legislative shouting match in the British House of Commons. The cacophony of metaphor that predicates my art making is I’ve learned a festivity of illusion, a carnival of escapist distractions, wherein lurk the shadowy figures of Doubt, Thieves of confidence, tempting one with false comparisons, unfair or unattainable objectives, or conversely, boisterous Boosters of Hubris, and the whisperers tantalizing the Self with dreams of riches, celebrity and fame, unfettered promiscuity, Excess, Power…

Realism or pragmatism is the antidote for the ludicrous displacement of value, meaning and purpose such reveries foment. It does help to participate in artist fellowship, if available, because so few of us don’t wrestle with the vortex of projected grayscale intangibles, material uncertainty, the gravity of post-contemporary upheaval and permeating, suffocating mass dismay. For a minute we pretended it away, through social media performance, until lived reality obviated that tactic’s absurdity. The Blockchain boom busted so fast and hard, leaving nothing more than a (metaphorical) smoking boot with a gory foot stump inside. MAGA devotees are lately the pathetic fodder of reels. Their idiotic to-the-death defense of the indefensible, coupled with impenetrable adoration for their the dealmaker-emperor-in chief, inflamed by the stubborn refusal to admit they’ve been played for rubes, confess they’ve been conned. For myself there’s no joy or fun to be had in the mockery of them in those ridiculous red, white and blue clown suits, or not much anyway. Not til you ponder the winners and what the spoils are, can you frame the losers and the loss properly. Even the rapture of sports fandom has been decimated by the profusion of legalized platform-betting and the conversion of athletics into a vanity whimsy of the superrich and a trillion dollar international hotdog-eating contest played by the media conglomerates. In case you’re wondering, if you’re not family, you’re food.

The Big A professional art world is only different from the global sports world in the details. In art we used to discuss medium, more than media. Which is no longer true. For now, for my first post-stroke art project, I’m leaning toward watercolor and ink, which I’ll discuss later [Note: chronological disorder]. Rather than using collage, digital or analog, or Mammon AI, in any guise. It has to be Art For Humans, but even that worries me. Am I on a fool’s errand, conjuring images with fog and mirrors, and framing them with echoes and shadow? Alas, will I be forced to admit the task is beyond my talents, or my considerable physical limitations? Which is when it hits me like a round kick upside the ole cabbage. Like the scene in Animal House, when John Belushi is making his ludicrous, incoherent pep talk, and we see him glitching. Art doesn’t require reason or words to exist, and I could not for the life of me tell you why I need to make it. Nor could I predict what might come of the gesture of trying, because the art act itself is in defiance of the odds, occurring as it does outside numeric law.

[Back to IRT: I completed my second left handed painting; a Modigliani-esque nude; and Elvis has left the building. The horrid catastrophe in Tibet and Nepal and the deaths of Yayoi Kusuma, Dolly Parton and Tim Curry provide the backdrop for my aesthetic breakthrough. I would be more inclined to continue with a broadcasted daily narration of Lefty’s (potential nome d’arte?) progress, if the systemic unraveling weren’t so abruptly, rudely, noisily obstructing dispersion of this bitsy, hopeful message. Lula and I will be narrowcasting instead, to a shortlist of friends, family, artsies, etc. As you know dear reader, I did go with ink and watercolor, and the results were unpredictable, a revelation. All the trepidation aforehand, turns out, was misplaced. The lessons were unforeseen. The role of practical experience combined with knowledge is inestimable, also in-class and -studio teaching and learning. The mind was the instructor of the untutored left limb, which subtly reminded the formerly dominant right side it still possessed animus. The heart acted as producer for the psyche’s direction, underwriting the synthesis of concept with handmade image. Even though I can barely walk 100’ in a good PT session, I was dancing like a Matisse cutout!]

[4]
I met Allan Ginsberg
At Casa Sin Nombre
At an opening
For his show of photos
We chatted very briefly
(I was soaked with cheap wine)
Before he fled
With his oriental boy
Photos of Kerouac Cassady et al
Gary Snyder pissing, boys holding hands
All over America…Where is Burroughs?
I think space aliens did it
He wants you to know his date of birth. He wants you to know where he’s sitting right now, as this book writes itself. Heaven arrives a parcel at a time. He is knocked off his steed by a bolt of lightning. The Dream has no beginning and no end. A cast of tens. A weaving. Everything is related. Everything changes.
[Deadlines Lifelines, p. 2]

La Belle 12” x 9” watercolor on paper (2026)

PLATES

Boy (2004)
CGU Studio 1 (2007)
CGU Studio 2 (2007)
Coil (2001)
Hand Iron (2005)
Lodge (2003)
Dancer (2003)
CGU Studio 3 (2007)
Wovenform + Pixel Painting (2008)

Stricken Part 2H

The Bear 12” x 9” watercolor and ink on paper, 2026

H. The Bear

Yesterday I completed my first serious artwork since the Stroke, 15 months ago, an ink and watercolor painting on paper, entitled “The Bear.” My dear JG had generously donated the modest funds with which we purchased the art supplies to get started. My brush collection is still in storage. After the Stroke I had instructed Lauren to give away my paints to friends in the Astoria [OR] art community (Bill and Annie), who had been immensely supportive prior to and during our move to NorCal under duress. I had ordered a set of Beampaints, and Sunday, after Lachlan’s AAU hoops minicamp, we shopped at Dick Blick in Berkeley, picking out a couple of fine watercolor brushes — one for washes, one for detail — india ink and a 2-for-1 pair of Canson 9” x 12” 140# cold press wc pads. I waited to begin painting until the following morning, allowing the creative juices to simmer overnight. I was absolutely thrilled to paint again, which came as a bit of a surprise, given that post-stroke, I was certain my life as studio painter had finished. In fact, I embraced the idea without reservation, from an art historical perspective rooted in the examination of artists’ lives, a Western tradition at least half a millennium old [shoutout to Giorgio Vasari, RIP], and one cultivated in Asia centuries before [s/o, The Mustard Seed Garden Tree]. I felt blessed to have survived the Stroke, even in my impaired condition, since it would, I reasoned, afford me the opportunity to reflect humbly on my artist life and perhaps take measures to ensure its perpetuation, as legacy. I found comfort and solace in how prolific I had been over a roughly 40-year span, not just as a plastic artist, but as a tech and media creative, as theorist/thinker, as an arts advocate and educator. Looking back, I found much to be proud about, even after acknowledging all the imperfections exposed along the way, in myself, the work, my relationships, the Way itself. On the whole, after a phase of intense retrospection, while still hovering near Death’s door, I decided to be satisfactorily retired as a practicing artist, and to dedicate my remaining time to participating in and enjoying my son’s exploits, my wife’s company and that of a few close relatives and friends, to the extent possible.

Yet, here we are! The gently persistent encouragement of folks I trust and admire, e.g., artists Joe Adams and David Pushkin, allies John Price and Diane Avice du Buisson, et al., eventually softened my stubborn resolve. The hunger to create overcame my attachment to the level of technical mastery I’d attained. Material concerns swept aside conceptual in- or prohibitions. Finally, my love of making art was stronger than its denial, which encompasses all manner of negation to which my mind/spirit is susceptible. Once more, art for me equals survival in matters of matter and beyond it, in the visual experience and its extrasensory opposite. Art is manifestation of a thing that didn’t exist before, and art reveals the welcoming nature of creation, towards the New. The artist is the vehicle for this mysterious event, which actually is anthro-fundamental, humano-normative. I could go on, but my poor words will never match the transcendent sensation, the intense vibration coursing through the paint, the painting, my flesh and blood, the viewer’s encounter with the art, its image, the story and all the stories that art evokes by being itself, in and of itself. Yes, I still gush, like a teenager in love’s thrall. Isn’t it wonderful?!

After a lifetime devoted to art, I am unclear: does art create the artist (and Man), or vice versa; are both true at once or over time? In art, I doubt the efficacy of binary subject and object to represent human reality, and in that doubt one becomes comfortable in not knowing, or rather knowing differently. Is it exaggeration to suggest that art reminds us how to be humans, if humans painted the cave walls of Chauvet? Conversely, art provokes the most inhumane impulses, expressions of ignorant disregard for beauty, adoration and the embodied sublime, a fact verified by countless acts of violent articide: in the news today, we have pictographs “as old as the pyramids,” adorning the Texan stone faces that Trump’s “Big, Beautiful Wall” would obliterate. Or consider the monumental Buddhas of Bamiyan the Taliban shot to pieces with cannon and missile in 2001? Or what about all the art willfully, violently destroyed out of hatred, or ruined by neglect, by relentless and rapacious Time, and Nature Herself. I finished the latest film adaptation of Ulysses right before commencing work on The Bear. The sacking of Troy resonated, especially the beheading of the Athena statue (and her human counterpart), which exposes the complexity of art, in binding History and Event, with body, mind/spirit in emotion, tying together our inclinations for cruelty and kindness, chaos and grace. It is wrong to liken art-making to madness (although it may be its closest asymmetrical relation)? They are truly antithetical. One is the homeopathic remedy for the other. Which is why Freudian analysis and its many derivatives are the Enemy of Art. To proclaim that Freud killed Pollack is not hyperbole. Which raises the question of what to make of Lucien Freud’s painting.

[Notes on the painting process] I started with a layer of overlapping washes. I had never used Beampaints before. The palette in my application of it is evocative of the hues of bruising, with which I’m trenchantly familiar. I began to use the small brush, touching the paint to the paper, daubing gingerly, lightly, minus the confidence of my right hand’s dexterity. John Lurie pops up in my mind’s eye, along with appreciation of and sympathy for his watercolors. I am unable to construct a formal armature at first, but I resist frustration, the despair, the whispers that the task is stupid and pointless, or worse, mediocre. I try to work at the kitchen table in the wheelchair, but after only a half hour, the pain in my right hip and left shoulder becomes debilitating, and I relocate to the bed. Lauren assists me in arranging everything. For the next five hours I am transported without going anywhere. Once the base layer is laid down, I periodically turn the pad, as I apply long strokes. Eventually, the procedure yields an irregular lattice of color. I will eschew recounting an exhaustive list of thoughts, memories, associations, etc., that percolated into my consciousness while I struggled with my sinister unlearned digits and pestering arthritis. In the background played French films: The Artist and the Model; La Belle Noiseuse; and Renoir. I notice an emergent dimensional form in the painting, which I initially resist. It is the disembodied, primitive, stylized head of a bear, which has powerful associations for me. I was once stalked by bear in New Mexico, which culminated in a dramatic confrontation and was followed by what I can only describe as a visionary experience, which I’ve chronicled elsewhere (in the White Buffalo text). For the next, last, phase of The Bear, I introduced the ink, making the latticework more complex and dimensional. At the end, when there nothing left to add, I signed it fitfully, clumsily, PJM, in the lower right corner, as if la cabeza del oso negro were about to gobble me up.

Painting is the greatest of the great teachers by whom my life’s been blessed. No summary of yesterday’s lesson could be adequate to convey the profundity of it, which I feel dumb typing on this laptop, even though it’s true, mercilessly so. Because art like this is a keenly solitary enterprise, which must not be offhandedly conflated with abject loneliness and isolation. What an odd contradiction! Because, while one is painting, memories awaken, folding and unfolding in convolution that interweaves past, present and future. These immaterialities are not evident in the art, but inhabit it, like ghosts trapped eternally in a house, even after the finite constuct is reduced to dust. Only love remains, which Benjamin incorrectly designated as aura. Art is love and its absence, its loss, which anyhow is not possible. Art never abandoned me. I only have to do/make it (latin, hacer), and once more am re-/un-/discovered. If I were to compose a verse on the subject, it would be a meditation on the amorous residue that we sense when we gaze at the moon. All that endures after the collapse of a fabled lunar kingdom, which flourished a million million years ago.

PLATES

Death Becomes Me (1998)
Bar Codes, Rituals + Subliminal Tapes (2004)
Heartless (2001)
Inside><Outside (2000)
Jackson (1997)
Overflow Show (2005)
Studio Dreams (1996)
Venus (1998)
Zia Diner (1994)
Chestnut Square (2002)

Stricken Part 2G

G. Neo-techne

Wednesday I was channel surfing, when I landed on an episode of 60 Minutes from earlier this year, the subject of which was AI “art,” rhetorically posing the question whether it was art at all. Naturally, Refik Anadol presented the pros, while Jerry Saltz and Molly Crabapple supplied measured counterpoints, if not outright cons. I proffered my position in an (unpublished) analysis for Ereignis a couple of years ago, strenuously arguing against the assertion that the output of first-wave text-prompt image generators met any reasonable standards for artistic merit. It’s been couple of years and hundreds of billions of invested dollars later, and, mountains of slop aside, talented creative practitioners (like Anadol, or my beautiful Bushwick friend Delphine Diallo) have leveraged integrated AI into global art world success. Which doesn’t mean that I’ve had to revise my initial impression of the technology, or its indefensible colonization of the real, analog arts ecosystem. At a time when an incomprehensible concentration of wealth has thoroughly decimated the cultural infrastructure. The art life is becoming increasingly precarious. The fragile social compact that flourished fleetingly in the 20th and 21st centuries, a democratic model sparking to life between world wars and radically redefining art, is in a state of dissolution and disrepair. How can we tell? We have markers we can point to: free public art education, exhibition and performance; the art critical press; free access to cultural institutions. All we have to do is review the outrageous attacks by the President, DOGE and those aligned with them on our nation’s premier museums, monuments, venues, and his ham-handed attempts to dominate the American imagination by installing his name, image and likeness on everything from money to warships and Capitol architecture. AI inundates the debacle, pays for it, is camouflaged by it. The New Swamp, replacing the one Trump promised to drain, is industrial, weaponized AI. It is using Gaza, Lebanon and Ukraine as testing grounds, producing hundreds of thousands of smashed and starved bodies. AI is powering the militarized ICE/CBP carceral, deportation, surveillance/spy complex, paid with a bloody fortune in taxpayer funds. AI is assisting corporate insurance giants in maximizing profits by depleting health care, reducing exposure to climate catastrophes through targeted lobbying and policy manipulation, coverage loopholes, client selectivity, market diversification and monopolization, financialization, etc. And OMG Wall Street. We are being SWAMPED by AI, its oligarchy and its toxic artificiality.

Delphine Diallo, collage for The New York Times (2018), *Everywhere and Nowhere* – Copyright the artist

Presently, (believe it or not) I am seeing the issue from a new angle. The titular maxim Art for Humans, the lodestar of my three-decade project, has taken on an added significance, in light of the ascension of the AI Machine. More than ever, I am clear on what constitutes vocational and occupational art, and what distinguishes it from its commercial cousin and technology enabled simulation. As well as what the stakes are, if we lose the power to discern among these phenomenal varieties loosely associated with creativity. For me, a critical element in the human-art-machine discourse is sentience, but at this point, given the immensity of pressure exerted by advocates intent on achieving no less than world domination, is there any hope for a truly collaborative exchange, rather than one premised on exploitation and the obliteration of opposition, or to put it another way — choice? After watching the aforementioned AI art segment [RIP 60 Minutes], as I was scanning the AFH still image archives at Flickr, I happened upon a photoset dated 2008, entitled “Scrambler (Josey Wales).” Back then I owned a CRT TV monitor and paid for cable. Now and again the transmission would glitch and digitize. I found the disrupted, chaotic images on the display to be quite beautiful, and took many digital photos in two sets: the first featuring a fractured and pixellated Grace Kelly in To Catch a Thief; the second featuring similarly de-figured Clint Eastwood in his iconic turn as a post-Civil War outlaw. I recognized similarities between these pictures and some of the graphics on the episode of 60, which illustrated how massive libraries of scraped images are incorporated and activated in Anadol’s monumental media expositions. He claimed hilariously all 150,000,000 of them were ethically sourced! My media-tic associative connection between my harvested glitch content and Refik’s supersized/immersive imagination slaughterhouse/screensaver device elicited another oblique turnabout in my ongoing Drift. I recalled my EGS courses with Lev Manovich, on data visualization. I’ve continued to trace Lev’s trajectory in the domain. Needless to say, I disagree with his boisterous defense of AI as a viable expressive tool, and most of his provocations regarding tech-aesthetics. However, with respect to both Anadol and Manovich, and so many others in the overlapped fields of culture, commerce and science, whose bread gets the most butter depends on one’s willingness to subvert one’s humanity by bending the knee to the invisible, unreal Masters of the Universe, and their fake mind/spirit.

The Exceptional and the Everyday: 144 hours in Kyiv; Lev Manovich

TECHNE
Techne: (Gr. techne) The set of principles, or rational method, involved in the production of an object or the accomplishment of an end; the knowledge of such principles or method; art. Techne resembles episteme in implying knowledge of principles, but differs in that its aim is making or doing, not disinterested understanding.
— G.R.M. (FROM THE DICTIONARY OF PHILOSOPHY)
[AFH Real "PURE" Digital Tumblr, September 17, 2009]

PLATES

Scrambler (Josey Wales) 1-9, 2008

Stricken Part 2F

F. Precognition

A New Dimension (installation view), “The Bloombergs,” Silver Shed Gallery NYC (2012)

Social media, for all the boosterism, has been co-opted to serve as a processing tool for online social exchange by the usual corporate syndicates.
While it’s very true that individual participants are still finding excellent uses for the systems, and that beautiful community organizing movements can work on Web 2.0 platforms, the macro is slaughtering the micro into media bits for consumption, and the promise of broadband and universal web access is failing to deliver democracy. What mostly occurs in today’s social media is an extension of media syndication, for commercial purposes.
This analysis doesn’t reach the real problem, however. The power-value of MS, FB and Twitter isn’t primarily in their advertiser apps. The juice fueling these platforms is their value as data pools, as case study environments, and back-door surveillance networks. An average user, enjoying FB for its capacity for reconnecting people separated by time and distance, isn’t usually aware of or concerned that an anonymous administrator or analyst or Homeland Security agent can acquire and apply data contained in a FB profile, 4Dimensionally integrating that information into massive databases to whatever end.
When the financial sector giants, the ones who caused the financial catastrophes of 2007 through the present and for the foreseeable future, began to divvy up the major social media sites among themselves, using blood-money from their US racket to do so, I’d had enough. If my high school friends want to let me know what they’re up to, they can email me at art at artforhumans dot com. I’ll be dumping all Google apps soon. “Do no harm,” my ass.
— AFH Real "PURE" Digital Tumblr, “Deactivation of AFH Social Media,” March 16. 2011

Notre Dame Grotto and Golden Dome (1983)

[1982] After abandoning psychology and theatre arts as majors, I settled on English at the end of freshman year, which was mainly dedicated to introductory classes: philosophy, theology, sociology, anthropology, psychology, and a liberal arts section which turned out to be marvelous, due to the instructor’s prowess (the dean emeritus, enjoying his golden years, whose name I can’t recollect, today). I received a first-rate survey of Western Lit at ND, which included: intensive forays into Existentialists, Comparative Lit, like Calvino, Marquez, Kazantzakis, et al. with Werge; the formidable John Matthias and Joe Duffy’s superlative courses, which introduced us to Pynchon, Owens, Davies, Pound, Eliot, Yvor Winters, and so many others. By the spring of ’85, having read hundreds of thousands of pages of words, literally, I reached saturation, which abetted my wholesale shift to art, my commitment to which became vocational. For the next dozen-plus months, I stumbled along from one extracurricular madcap, boozy misadventure to the next, in the meantime feverishly painting a series of mixed media portraits of the artist-alcoholic as a young man that would comprise my unauthorized senior thesis show. Upon graduation from Notre Dame, and barely surviving that terrible motorcycle crash aforementioned, I got hit by lightning (no kidding), and shortly thereafter hit the highway again with my lifelong mentor Don Vogl, his son, also Paul, and another former student of my professor. Along the way, I obsessively plowed through dozens of the popular Louis L’Amour Westerns, purchased at truck stops, as we tripped from South Bend to San Francisco, Vegas, Santa Fe, and back, camping in parks like Yosemite, Redwood, Rocky Mountain National and dozens of others. Don painted lovely plein air pictures. I filled a sketchbook with ink blot-like compositions — which, by the way, developed into a lifelong practice. [RIP, Don. You were one of the most important figures in my life.] Highlights: A full moon at the base of El Capitan on tuinol, weed and whiskey, chatting with Bambi; dropping acid at the Grand Canyon, then driving through the red en route to Sin City; capturing a very large tarantula at White Sands, missiles zooming overhead. My confidence in concrete Reality was definitely getting precarious.

My fellow graduates were interning on Wall Street, on deployments, or celebrating their scholastic achievements in domestic hotspots or abroad. The nerds went straight to med school or whichever grad program/professional training pertained to their designated career path. A lot of them got right to work, in the family business and whatnot. Me, I was spending a decadent month in a custom van on the road with three or four exceedingly colorful guys. One of whom had just finished a prison stint for knifing an Irish football player in a bar brawl. We had this shoebox full of all sorts of drugs (Don never partook), and also buckets of beer, and the radio — a perpetual source of rancor, since our tastes in tunes diverged precipitously. Things got REAL, and real complicated, sometimes in a slow burn, other times like Vesuvias, or a barrage of bottle rockets on the 4th of July. We had no GPS, no cellular or smart phones, no Internet. It was a vastly different world, in so many respects. That was forty years ago, but it may as well be 4,000. When reflecting on those differences, to me the most pronounced is in the character of American folk in general, the pace of our lives, how we connected and interacted with arc other, our expectations, how we expressed grief or pride, the rituals. The crazed velocity of change, its inertia, has left most of us untethered from any fixed assumption of knowable causality. Certainty is dead, and disruption rules.

No wonder a remarkable number of Americans identify as artists and/or entrepreneurs (see Sholette’s Dark Matter), in most cases, a short-lived delusion, shattered as soon as one approaches a dealer or just a gallerista, concocts a semi-legit business plan, or just a spread sheet for startup expenses and revenue projections. “Never let the truth get in the way of a good story,” an old Irishman I knew used to say! Auto-identifying as an artist still can serve as a glamorous justification for being broke, without viable prospects, desperate, bodily unwell and generally unstable. As long as you’re able to present a vivacious hustler-creative avatar mirage for the streams, you’re still in the Game, am I right? Who’s going to contradict your nominal improviso, in the absence of artistic definition? Be sincere, or not — it ought not matter; either stance can gain traction, depending on your target demographic/platform, if you take the leap and go wired! If you are strenuously committed to your phantasm, I recommend avoiding counter-narratives, like those populating the feeds of Bloomberg News, and also that you not track his (Michael Bloomberg’s) substantial art world exploits, just one his many transactional, public-facing patronage gestures, especially during his corrupt third mayoral term, a structural premonition of Trump, who cloaks his graft and grift in the flag, not front-page NGO grants. What I mean is, don’t bother yourself with pesky macro-economic facts and figures (e.g., the Handbook on the Economics of Arts and Culture). Don’t investigate Eli and Edythe Broad’s brand of “venture philanthropy,” KB Home/Sun America, which made him a billionaire, and was instrumental in causing the Great Recession. You’ll not want to grok the big picture of art’s relation to power in late stage capitalism. I did just that in the early 2010s and paid dearly for the indiscretion of principled dissent. I recommend Hannah Arendt on the topic of complicity among friends, too, if ignorant bliss proves unsustainable. Ain’t it sad, what a soul has to set aside, to simply paint a happy mountain or tree? [God bless you Bob Ross, RIP] Tang ping.

Stricken Part 2E

E. Origins

I was born in the eastern mountains to a tiny village where the mothers cling to babes, and cougars stalk in the night. I grew to manhood in emerald forests and in holes in the hillsides. Like many a young man, I grew restless when I came of age. In the spring of my eighteenth year, I bid my family and our people fare-thee-well; the womenfolk packed my sack with light and tasty delights, and the men took my hand offered wise advise, and the children hid behind their mother’s skirts. I was at once melancholy and elevated, for my fate lay ahead of me, awaited me like a maid in her chamber, the Shiva. So, I took to the paths, roads and highways, to seek my destiny.
— The Trial of Jim Dandy 1990?)

My generation was the last for whom comic books and pulp fiction were a formative force, gripping mostly young boys’ collective imagination. We can talk about graphic novels, Mr. Beast, Drake and Web 2.0, but post Covid, hardly anything of my childhood remains intact. At most, what’s left are echoes, nostalgia, skeletons, hardly enough to mock. What the girls were into back then? Because I didn’t have sisters, and my popular female cousins weren’t forthcoming, the preoccupations of the fairer sex were mysterious beyond my ken. As for the macro-culture, I don’t want to infer that TV wasn’t making a dent, because assuredly it was. But it was the golden age of network television, and our viewing options in rural southern West Virginia were quite limited, relatively speaking. Same deal with radio, AM and FM. In Beckley, we had a couple of radio stations, movie houses and record stores. Word of mouth was how you found out about the latest hot number, show, style, etc. Persistent effort was required to be trendy. The economics of cool were much more modest, after the 50’s. Magazines could give you an edge, on top of their utility as diversion. Childhood I thought was divided between stuff you were expected to do: from chores to sports, plays and recitals, block parties, church, parades, holidays and family dinners, that sort of thing, and a lot of it was fun, or not terrible and dull; and the stuff you did on your own, plus the neighborhood stuff, which with us, usually ended with a fight and/or some kid bawling or parents calling the children home for supper. There was greater societal cohesion. I hung out at the hobby shop, where I scored military miniatures, paints and brushes, glue, and at the newsstand. Dad generously supported these habits, and never punished me for swiping a few bucks from his wallet and pants to indulge them. Iron Fist, Sgt. Rock, all the DC and Marvel icons populated my inner world. The passion of my comics fixation proved a gateway drug-like aperture into escapist text, and serial printed matter. As a teen I got hooked on Howard’s Conan the Barbarian, after I’d fanboyed on comic book Conan. Same with Doc Savage. Every so often we’d take a drive to Charleston, which included stops at camera shop and excellent hobby shop, a nice restaurant and maybe even the Sunrise museum.

A funny thing happened. I got hooked on books, and spent hours at our small town public library, after school, on weekends, in summer. It helped to have a labor historian mom, who also voraciously consumed mystery novels, and a dad who assiduously took medical journals and read complete sets of both World Book and Encyclopedia Brittanica, A-Z, just because he decided to. By the time I finished high school, I had read hundreds fiction and non-fiction titles, worked on the school newspaper and literary journal, written poetry, was making music and mixtapes, performing on the stage, collaborating on cool projects, like launching a variety show with kids from school. Mostly, it was a blast! Glorious. Special. All that, plus Star Wars, Jaws, D&D, Parliament/Funkadelic, Devo, and everything, including my jock life, which I haven’t even broached yet, and girls, my dear Appalachian mountains, dance/ballet, the telephone, Myrtle Beach: an amalgamation, this becomes my art, art life, and my original social aesthetic. Europe, the Church and its Reformation, New York, Hollywood, philosophies from Socrates to the 68ers, they were all external factors, of variable determinacy, but I wouldn’t interrogate these influences until college. In the 80s, what I and plenty of others around the world discovered simultaneously was a promising new possible future, juicy beyond belief or measure, emerging from the rubble of previous decades’ 20th Century upheaval and technological acceleration. As soon as our visionary window opened, revenant malevolent forces, mostly bent on retaining, maintaining and obtaining the levers of domination, of control, allied with psychopathic nerd greedheads, run-of-the-mill bloodthirsty thugs, maniacal religious fanatics and untethered amoral spooks, teamed up to crush our living dreams, smash the new planetary consensus, commonwealth, or whatever the blessed movement we were fomenting and which was organically emerging in a manner that some referred to as pre-figuration. Which is too bad, because, as has become plainly, painfully obvious, humanity was being given a final opportunity to mend its ways, level up, mass consciousness-wise, and reconnect with the earthly paradise that was our birthright, which was going the way of the dodo, or Hiroshima, or the moon. We blew it and we knew it, by Y2K, or 9/11, or to present-tense this civilizational train wreck, a few selfishly evil pricks and they botox-faced hoes are spoiling the everywhere forever dream party for the rest of us. About 8 billion of us, not to mention, a whole planet of sentient beings. If you read nothing else, before it’s really too late, read DFW’s Infinite Jest. A laugh a minute. Or cry.

PLATES

Meta-elements and patterns series 1-5

Stricken Part 2D

D. Prospectus

“I think that only time tells about painting. No artist knows in his own lifetime whether what he does will be the slightest good, because I think it takes at least seventy-five to a hundred years before the thing begins to sort itself out from the theories that have been formed about it. And I think that most people enter a painting by the theory that has been formed about it and not by what it is. Fashion suggests that you should be moved by certain things and should not by others. This is the reason that even successful artists—and especially successful artists, you may say - have no idea whatever whether their work’s any good or not, and will never know.”
- Interviews with Francis Bacon by David Sylvester, p. 69

[The 4D Road cinema studies resume; back shift to literature; drift into New Media, and so on.] Monday started with Stranger Than Paradise, which is now one of my top ten favorite motion pictures, joining another Jarmusch film, Dead Man. on the list. Both are Drift stories. The former opened the floodgates to a lifetime of memories of criss-crossing the continent by plane, train and automobile (RIP, John Candy). The poignancy of Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man, and I can throw in Down by Law here, arises from twists on American fables, parables and tropes: rags to riches; low lives and mean streets; the immigrant experience; luck and industry; the interplay of savages and schemers with the Man on their heels; beauty, innocence and the hovering malice of exploitation; the convergence of worlds old and new. These themes and threads in turn tap into ancient legends, myths and archetypes. Which I traced on through Bergman’s Wild Strawberries, and Goddard’s Contempt, the Odyssey, and round and round we go, going, gone: (back io the future?) to 2001: A Space Odyssey! Does anyone else recognize a relativity to Rafik Anadol’s splashy projections in the eye-popping closing sequences of 2001, which, by the way, is inarguably a great Drift film, and also speaks directly to public AI discourse, Singularity fears, etc.? …in Permanent Vacation, the Drift is explicit. More Drift filmography: Slackers, The Road, Road to Perdition, Bottle Rocket, Easy Rider, Powwow Highway, the Hobbit, Wild at Heart, Being There, Wings of Desire, Road Warrior, Forrest Gump…on and on.

Adjacent to this rich kinetic media content seam is Drift literature’s dynamic 2D inter-cultural mother lode. Wide as the world, old as mankind, and going strong today, with no sign of abating: e.g., Gilgamesh, Beowulf, the Monkey King, Bhagavad Gita, Exodus, the Divine Comedy, the Canterbury Tales, Candide; and frankly, this is just a shortlist off the top of my head, derived from a fundamental or universalist criteria. Can an argument be put forth for a Unified Road/Drift Theory of language? An excellent topic for a seminar, say I, wistfully, given that such a liberal-minded chimera of a course is as likely in 2026 academia as one focused on great labor victories of all time being cheerfully offered at the Wharton School! Whilst a speculative curriculum operates like a thought experiment in our depleted and fractured, increasingly privatized national educational schema, one may yet be able to cobble together or “curate” a plausible, sound, personal set of texts by which one is inspired, inflamed, informed, or charmed — the equivalent in platformed vernacular to top# playlists, favorites and bookmark chains. Which multi-serve as ad bait, community circle identifiers, profile enhancers and so on. The medium thrives on preference as commodity. Not too long ago, accumulating an impressive literary reference catalog was a signifier of cultivation, intelligence, curiosity, open-mindedness; attributes associated with hallowed Enlightenment ideals. Silicon Valley’s civilization-scale techno-blitzkrieg project is diametrically opposed to the prior models for mass acculturation, particularly democratic ones (see Dewey). The evidence is literally in our faces, at our fingertips, in the APPS! Our attention spans are plummeting. Folks are losing their ability to solve problems. Mental illness is ubiquitous. We are not reacting correctly to barbarity, abnormality, cruelty. Much of this maladjustment is directly attributable to the proliferation of wired/networked electronic devices. Which are more and more dependent on machine-learning. Panic is appropriate, sister!

I’ll confide in the reader a few selected works in the Road-lit genre that moved me deeply when I first read them: Kerouac’s On the Road, Least Heat-Moon’s Blue Highways, Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. They meshed inextricably with my identity, defining significantly my peculiar American perspective: Beat-inflected, contemporary indigenous, Gonzo. Don’t forget, I came of age in the Post-War era, the 60s and 70s, in West-by-God Virginia, a period that is egregiously under-examined and misunderstood by the “coastal elites,” who were therefore almost entirely unprepared and dismissive of the Reagan-led reactionary shift that laid the groundwork Bush I and II, the neocons and Trump, on the one hand, and neoliberal Clinton and Obama, on the other. From dopey Ronnie through OWS and my beloved Bernie, my view of politics, the economy and society resembles the unspeakable, inexcusable horrors of Battle of the Somme, that wasteland, if it were live-streamed at a beyond-luxe soiree for the glitterati internationalists, the Davos crowd, a mix of old and new millionaires, billionaires and the odd trillionaire, their servants, management, carnal playthings, trainers, dietitians, PAs, security, pets, and celebrity entertainers, chillin’ above the Cloud in a SpaceX-branded sky palace. Soundtrack is Krakatoa, by B-52s.

PLATES

Transmediale Sketches 6-18

Stricken Part 2C

C. Synthesis

[From White Buffalo; The Story of a Mayan Prince & Others; Paul Joseph McLean Among the Scholars of War; Frontispiece; 1990]

CODA
By Ezra Pound
O my songs
Why do you look eagerly and curiously into people’s faces
Will you find your lost dead among them?

Were J.P. and I similarly predisposed? It’s hard to be sure, especially after four decades. We naturally recognized in each other a longing for freedom that the road seemed capable of delivering then, which, by the by, seems endangered, if not extinct, in 2026. Did we take it too far? I’ve always thought JP was more the pragmatist, in Vans or loafers and a tie. Who’s to say! Fuck, I thought that was the point, to take it to the limit (Eagles)! The American interpretation of carpe diem relied on cash, a Rand McNally atlas, and the Boss (Nebraska, but his whole catalog, plus a hundred other great songs, albums, bands, artists). Lucky for us, back in the day, you could ramble on the cheap, if you were not adverse to periodic situational discomforts (e.g., out of money, sleeping on the floor in a dingy basement under somebody else’s coat) and the odd, gritty egalitarianism economy travel occasionally demands (…with three strangers). In my case, alcoholism consistently skewed outcomes, and not favorably. Now, I do recognize the the questionable accuracy of my rearward gaze and assessments. How reliable is my eyewitness testimony, forty years after the fact, post-stroke, peering through the warped lens of my tenuous perceptual apparatus? Fairly early in recovery, I was forced to admit that I’d lost the ability to discern between truth and falsehood. Has that ability regenerated over the past three and a half decades, like a salamander’s tail? To which I would say, at least to my own satisfaction, I’m on on pretty solid ground, truth-wise. I can at minimum assure you I’ll do my level best to not pull your leg, hoodwink you or steer you wrong. That, at a juncture in which blurring the line between fact and fiction has never been more commonplace. I could finger the prevariagator-in-chief (ew), but the BS that dude spews day in and day out (Joy Division) obliterates the curve then.What is the truthiness gold standard today, anyway? Wait! Don’t reply: we might risk jettisoning reason altogether, if we started agreeing on the obviously real; the crisis of veracity is hardly an academic literary abstraction, early in the second quarter of the 21st Century. It is literally a sign of civilization melting down, like the reactor at Chernobyl. To summarize, I’m not going for photorealism here, not trompe l’oeil, not brut, or any aesthetic pushing harsh objectivity or clever illusion as deception, cushy sentimentality as camouflage for nasty intentions and/or predatory malevolence, subversive or subliminal messaging, or straightforward ugliness as provocation or flaunting the lack of meaningful constraints. Nope. I wouldn’t want to give Plato an excuse to boot me out of his Republic, not that he would know art. even if it cracked him in his skull like a 2x4.

I’ve devoted a lifetime to investigating the Road Man thoroughly, if not objectively, as a dimensional phenomenon. I’ve gathered enough anecdotal data to form rhizomatic theories about it, sufficient to mold a curriculum on it, to subjectivivize it. In so doing I can deduce that to wanderlust is inherently human, even though one person won’t feel the drive as keenly as another, for any number of reasons. As such, virtually all cultures produce exemplar representations, stories, images, songs, that describe, perform or depict their precise paradigm of wandering. Our (humanity’s) expressive diversity on this theme is indeed remarkable, and our appetite for Road-urge-related content is practically inexhaustible. It has many names: e.g., the Path or Way; Quest; usually presenting and perpetuated as Gesamtkunstwerk; it’s all-direction scalable — reducible to the individual or expansive, encompassing what we call world-building; historical, as per migrations of peoples; or more abstractly, applicable to movements, in the political sense. I would argue this universal Road fixation/fascination is as fundamental to human nature as love itself, and as strong as our idea of home, the wish to belong someplace, and to know that place is where you will always belong. The dream of Paradise as destination at the journey’s end hinges on the traveler’s survival of a myriad of threats and dangers. We need roots, but dwell on rootlessness, and are torn between the fixed pole of stasis, and the idealization of endless, constant motion. We perpetually mourn that which is lost or left behind, and with matching indulgence, fantasize about the horizon’s imagined promise, which rarely meets or exceeds our lofty expectations.

Stricken Part 2B

B. Compulsion

[Johnny Law Kilt Mah Bruther, pg. 2 > First draft, circa 1988, plus several revisions over the years]

ghosts shades of memories memories
flickering in twilight
autumn scars
& Johnny Law monitors it all on CB channel 9
shivering at midnight
under the cover of darkness
the fire unattended burns low
I, the shy one
see the girls at the meeting hall
dangled in the hush of elegant whispers
catapult in the spark shower into legend
in black steel trimmed with chrome
Johnny Jack, American child

[Back to 1984, or was it ’85] What a trip! Somewhere on the Road — where exactly? Did I get a snapshot at the fateful instant? — I fell deeply in love with my country. Or was I seduced? No, it’s wrong to use the language of romance to describe this chimerical feeling, a collage of hormones, allegiance pledges, a million sights, sounds and smells. Like mist in a Kentucky valley, crickets and toads in a Mississippi evening, and gasoline at the pump at a mon’n’pop filling station in Jersey. My biggest revelation in those early years (roughly ’82-’90) was how enormous the USA is geographically. It was the metaphysical expanse that blew my mind wide open. By God, TEXAS! With JP that summer I got to absorb America as a wide-eyed naif, an innocent, trying to figure out. what cool is and how I could be that. Oh to be young and clueless, reckless with abandon, and full of simmering juice! In a month we traversed thousands of miles, cruising through and pausing in wildly differing ecologies and cultures, North, South, East and West. I fell in love with roadside attractions, some hokey, some illuminating. Eventually, the history, kitsch, commerce began to blend together and blur. We sprinted up the Rocky steps, giggling, stoned. I played mournful sax, a paean to miners, on a rocky outcrop overlooking a valley creek in my hometown under a bright full moon. The World’s Fair in the Big Easy was amazing, especially those gorgeous neoclassical sculptural decorations. The balmy ride along the Gulf Coast was just WOW! On our trek I fell in love with then-affordable local and regional quick-serve foods (which were largely made from scratch, but in big batches, wryly, commonly touted as “home cookin’”): Chowder! Biscuits and Gravy! Gumbo! Barbecue! We ducked and dodged giant flying cockroaches in Houston, hanging out by Big D’s pool, with Christmas lights all around, festooned like a Mexican vacation resort. …We somehow made it back to South Bend in time for classes. At the start of junior year, I wasn’t refreshed and invigorated by my summer break. I was a strung out wreck.

Back at school, I grappled with my powerful Road conversion, which haunted my days and nights. A glimpse of the freeway would trigger overwhelming, irrational bouts of longing. I daydreamed about the Interstate. I sympathized with those lonesome outlaws when they crooned about the lost highway calling to them, telling sad tales about how they end up running on empty or on the run from the Man, eventually pulling on a smoke, sitting by a jukebox playing Hank or Patsy, in some rundown honkytonk, bone-weary, whiskey-drunk, beat-down and broken-hearted. The flip side of that depressing trope filed me up, too! Skynyrd, Tom Petty, Jackson Browne, and dozens of others became my life’s soundtrack after that summer with JP. My Road obsession began to manifest in impulsiveness, manic spontaneity. The drive-to-drive adeptly configured itself to be intimately personal to me, similar to a death encounter. [Those unfortunately were occurring with increasing frequency, which we can get into later.] On a whim I would hop a flight to New York out of Chicago, on People’s Air, $49 each way. Imagine! I was selling hand-painted FunkShunArt t-shirts to fund seat-of-you-pants jaunts all over the continental USA. The Road was becoming my mainline fix, an overarching mindset and frame of reference, a secular replacement for the Catholicism of my youth, whose influence was rapidly waning, with every toke, blackout, hookup, Violent Femmes concert and art stomp up and down the Avenues of Manhattan. I was becoming aware of the rich and varied Road symbology, and the many arcane codes, the twisted metal burnt out metaphors. Mine would turn out to be a permanent awakening to the American land and people and what binds us [Main Street], at depth.

This phase of realization entailed profound psychic change, which unfolded contiguously to my fanatical immersion in and devotion to art life, which itself came on like a flash flood, avalanche or meteor shower, capsizing me, swamping me, plundering the good boy persona I’d cultivated in high school. Now, I was living a nutty version of Art School Confidential, chasing muses, visiting hundreds of galleries and dozens of museums, partying and painting day and night, doing shows, readings, screenings — and scrambling to maintain a decent GPA, call home at least once and shield my parents from any fallout my misadventures generated. I imagined I was discovering who I might really be meant to be. A new self-image was materializing, with serious implications for my future, my life path. In the immortal words of the Allman Brothers, (I had decided) I was born a ramblin’ man, and began concocting a lineal argument, quasi-factual, to support that contention. The rationale was circular: I inherited a potent predilection to wander (genetic defense); I behaved the way I did because of an impossible-to-resist-or-deny desire to wander, which was the result of a) peer pressure, b) acculturation, c) drugs and alcohol, d) bad parenting, e) bad society, etc., etc., etc. In short, nothing was my fault, if I got in.trouble for any of the wild child stunts I pulled, which, again, was happening more and more often, becoming more of a chore to hide, with serious consequences attaching. In reality, the friction could be chalked up to my reticence to embrace being and becoming 1) a 20th Century American artist/writer/thinker, 2) an alcoholic, and 3) Free, a true, pure Road Man, without knowing how to do it, or what any of “it” was , or what “it” meant, or that that was really what I attempting. I can’t help but admire my youthful audacity and pity my alcoholic denial, willfulness and ignorance. Instead, I did what any liberal arts-trained fellow when faced with an intractable metaphysical dilemma would do. I pantomimed a scientific method of self-discovery. For example: I prospectively charted my Urge to Road (U2R) as a clinician might chart a disease: the U2R became pronounced when I turned 18 and left home for college. U2R started to manifest in modest weekend sojourns, then fall (to Colorado) and spring breaks (Oregon), and a couple of awesome late summer weeks in California, then sophomore year… Twelve action-packed months later, I was progressing toward an epiphany. …Like that. {The text would benefit from a fancy graphic here; data visualization; Cartesian planes… Ed} Needless to say, authority figures and loved ones were becoming concerned by my passionate disintegration.

PLATES

Gallery 1

[Description: Samples from the California Car Culture print folio (circa 2007)]

Gallery 2

[Description: Samples from WP Last Rites FUNerAll Road Trip (2009), LA2WV]

Stricken Part 2

A. Conversion

In my dreams last night I brought out a pile of my manuscripts and proceeded to integrate fragments of them into Stricken. My dream self explained to me the ins and outs of the procedure, providing immaculately detailed examples. It was wonderful and went on a long time in both worlds. Upon awakening, I thought it over. The more I thought about the idea, the more excited I got. Over the past couple of weeks, I’d added 8,000 words to this text, an addition that came with a high cost: terrible pain on my arthritic left shoulder joint, due to the hunt-and-peck technique I used to type on the MacBook Air with my remaining viable arm and digits. Being an author hurts, man! Part 2 of Stricken at first was consistent with Part. 1, but the all-directional story gained momentum until it was an eruption, a 4D MEGAzine, a form and/or style (Blogger on ‘roids) which I had claimed to abandon, months before the stroke, because I lost confidence in the average online reader to possess the stamina to scan, much less close read any piece longer than 450 words. Thanks Web 2.0! Anyway, I must now concede that the Stroke has degraded my editorial impulse, which never was a strength. So I’m going through with it: I finished second draft of Stricken Part 2, and plan to insert entries from my old, mostly unpublished books, dissertation thesis and poetry collections throughout the essay. And in the manner of the MEGAzine, introduce dramatic voices for commentary, elucidation or meta-lit purposes. I do invite feedback, and would welcome input. Some of the friends and family still following my soc.media streams are accomplished wordsmiths yourselves. If you have a minute, and are so-inclined DM me or add a pointer or correction in the comments section. My dream self advised to crowdsource edit Stricken, which is kinda what you have to do when you don’t already have an editor, i.e., when you are writing on spec, like I am. Happy face emoji.

[Deadlines Lifelines, pg. 1 > First draft, circa 1987, plus several revisions over the years]

fog in eyes of morning
plastic sun through blinded window

Hello Day

stretch seams of memory
time past
was it time propelled the orb in which I find myself
or the orb self-propelled

The covers stick to my legs.
I perspire.

Oh, summer.

with neither currency nor even tobacco
credit nor endurance
worth no longer equal debits
the Author approaches his journal
waving his quill at sunshine Real

what interpretation would you offer this man
whose rational faculties he long ago abandoned
as insufficient or worse
useless

for what reason in Death’s misapprehension & the neglect of Now?
a simple blessing on those of Will
whose insistent prodding produced an afterlife in one mortally attired

[1984] On the transatlantic flight from Zurich to Boston, I had an allergic reaction to the penicillin I’d been prescribed. My finger had gotten badly infected in Israel, after the Red Star of David medics patched me up. I could have lost it to amputation, had the infection gotten much worse. The swelling was hideous, as my digit filled with pus and blood. The pain was excruciating. I took buses from the north to first Tel Aviv, then Jerusalem, to procure treatment. I was delirious, and don’t know how I managed any of this on my own in a foreign country. The first doctor opened the wound to reduce the swelling/pressure. A couple days later the second cauterized the incision, in order to stanch the loss of blood. I’ll spare the reader gory details, but I assure you, it was gory. I had no idea how dangerous the antibiotic was for me. I realized something was wrong in a Swiss airport bathroom stall, during the plane change and short layover. Once we were airborne again, the rash in the crotch (rapidly spreading) was the first symptom, followed by a raging fever, then the throat closing, labored breathing, all-over weakness, lightheadedness. I rang the stewardess, who, expressing some concern, brought a blanket and orange juice. She huddled with other stewardesses, and somebody notified the captain. They paged for a doctor among the passengers. He was a dapper, ambivalent, composed chap. After looking me over, he quietly declared I was suffering from anaphylaxis, and there was nothing to be done, returning promptly to his seat. It became clear that Swiss Air wasn’t about to turn the plane around for me, so I shook and shivered for hours, struggling to breathe. I recall confusion, being afraid and feeling alone with my fate. I failed to grasp how the unexpected and surreal a visitation by Death at 30,000 feet could belong only to me in a certain way, though lots of people were nearby. And yes indeed, this was real, it was happening. Nothing romantic about it. No way to talk yourself out of it. Then, obviously, I survived, and upon my disembarking the airliner, Dad the dermatologist diagnosed my malady immediately and correctly, stopped at a pharmacy en route to our hotel, the Piaza, scored Benadryl and ephedrine I guess, and like magic, I was in couple of hours all better!

My liminal Beantown stateside homecoming was Joycean, or Faulknerian, by which I mean it was a layered, faceted funhouse mirrors affair, alternately rapturous and bleak. I felt emotionally raw, overly sensitive and inside-out, like a snake that had just shed its skin. In hindsight, l admit I was a handful for my parents and siblings, and probably for most of those with whom I had any incidental contact, e.g., hotel staff. It should have been fun and happy, a nice, memorable family vacation. Instead, because I was in the throes of extreme culture shock, and a handful of mental, emotional and spiritual crises — not terribly atypical for young man of twenty, but exacerbated by undiagnosed early onset alcoholism and PTSD from my very recent near-death experience — I selfishly ruined it for everybody. An episode of projectile vomiting after an enormous seafood dinner did not help anything. Plus, Boston is, simply put, uniquely weird. One sunny Sunday morning, a little hungover, I ventured outside and found myself immersed in the annual Shriner’s parade and convention. Picture a huge teeming throng of pale, drunk, cigar-chomping middle-aged and -class otherwise patriotic American dads whooping and hollering openly on the central boulevards of that historic port city, flamboyantly costumed as gay caricatures of Arabs, waving scimitars, teetering on stilts or driving miniature clown cars, grabbing ass, guffawing like madmen. I climbed and sat on a plop art marble perch and chain-smoked cigarettes, expressionless, peering through the darkened lenses of my Ray-Ban aviators. This absurd, madcap spectacle was a perfectly uncanny distortion of the dangerous, explosive, rapidly modernizing ancient world I had just bounced in and out of, making a getaway by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin. As I pondered the passing phantasmagorical parade, something snapped inside my psyche, and my future suddenly dematerialized, slipped into a state of indeterminacy, or flux. My shit unwound fast. I would no longer be spending the remainder of summer in Appalachia. Not remotely possible! Out of the question! Oh, the histrionics. Mom and dad didn’t know what to make of it, or me, and I did not possess the necessary equipment to explain myself to them or anyone else. Which somewhat explains the Why of my turn toward art thing as Deus Ex Machina. Art does not ask for an explanation and be itself without one. An artist must confidently act before the explanatory narrative eradicates the freedom feeling one needs to create free art.

That afternoon, I commenced a frantic search of the Globe’s classifieds, answered an ad, made a phone call, and ricocheted to Cape Cod — I don’t remember how I got there from Boston, just how awkward it was to shear away from the family — securing a gig as counselor at the Hyannisport Y camp for underprivileged youth. A frenetic, but often lovely, Waldenesque month later, I flew the coop once again, embarking on a cross-country road trip with my buddy J.P. in his nondescript, sensible, boxy American-made sedan with the cool moniker, “The Gray Ghost.” We wrote, performed, rehearsed, studied, discussed and listened to songs and drank bourbon, visiting our friends and family along the way. I composed lyrics and improvised vocals, while he banged out tunes on his guitar. We passed through White Plains, Cohasset, Philly, Pittsburgh, Beckley, Savannah, New Orleans, Houston, a few other places, big and small. J.P. educated me on his proper rules for traveling the mythic American Road: there is a driver, navigator, sometimes passengers, with clearly defined roles and parameters; stopping for gas (so cheap back then) was a focused, regimented activity, and stopping to pee in between those fuel stops was frowned upon; Chicken fried steak and cherry or key lime pie as key metrics for evaluating diners; off-road fun, e.g., in homage to the Situationists, long-walking high as an ersatz X-sport; an eccentric frisbee golf, which I personally thought stupid at the time, though my views on it have softened considerably; inebriated arts/history/philosophy, a competitive discourse; and incessant and encyclopedic Rock’n’Roll exposition, at depth. Before now, I had no clue you just do this, pull a stunt like this! Forty years later, I ask myself, what if we had just kept going? Or, while we’re speculating on possible futures that never materialized, because I chose another one before I knew one could choose, what if I had phoned that captivating Amazonian beauty from the kibbutz I met on the bus from Capernaum to Tel Aviv? I would ask Siri or Claude, but what good would any answer they might concoct do me or anyone. Maybe if Sam Altman or Elon attaches a Holodeck-like contraption to the prompt form at least I could lose myself in a rich and believable hallucination, a la the Matrix. My red dress fantasy girl was a golden brown sabra in Greek sandals, Daisy Mae cutoffs, a blue tube top and sun kissed curly long hair. The Agent was Israel as it is in 2026

Plates

LIST

Masada
Old City Bath
Low Tide, Cape Cod
Boys on the Lake
Dane 1
JP 2009
Dane 2
Gulf Coast
JP’s Guitar
Dome
Eagle Atlas
Graveyard
Place
Poseiden
HiRise
The Pond
Qumraan
Jerusalem
Rising (Detail)
Pittsburgh Punk Girl
Rising )Horizontal)
Zeus
Savannah

Stricken

4D Form, “No Mas,” Co-Lab, Austin, TX; digital graphic for animation (2013)

Part 1

As an undergraduate art student at Notre Dame in the 80s, I obsessively researched, pouring through the main library’s stock of 25,000+ coffee table books. Henry Moore was one of the first artists to grab my attention, and he still does. A few hours ago I saw in my instagram feed a wonderful clip extracted from an antique documentary that zoomed in on the famed sculptor’s hands and tools. I realize I hadn’t come close to an encyclopedic knowledge of the canon, and never will. It may not be humanly possible. An open question is whether AI could make it so. Or whether there is any likelihood of a coordinated public/private project to chart, catalog and explore the role of art in civilization. A database, in a word. In 2026 it is fair to ask why and for whom such a thing should be contrived. Admit it. We can no more agree on what art is, than we can war or peace, right or wrong. “We” has lost the semblance of cohesion, and meaning is hanging on by a thread!

I vaguely recollect Google trying to launch a comprehensive online culture portal and library, a warehouse for digitized artifacts, but copyright foiled the attempts some time ago. Those in a position to decide whether or not to launch such a vast humanitarian effort appear to have had other plans and priorities for the technology, and attaching civil policy, governance. How to justify or rationalize the turn from art to techno fascism, or whatever this is? Expediency or efficiency? God gave us permission? Because force can be expressive, too? Is it a turn or an eternal dance? The all-in gamble on Artificial Intelligence ended the West’s Enlightenment once and for almost all. Instead of archives and a 21st Century New Deal, we are training machines to replace humanity, draining water reservoirs, burning through stockpiles of munitions and mismanaging energy in crazy ways.

It’s Monday and for the first time I watched Bertolucci’s The Conformist — on our big flat panel TV, wireless via YouTube, with subtitles. The Plato’s Cave scene was magical, in the sense it precipitated in my mind a series of contingencies, congruencies, revelations. Cinema can do this. Suddenly I could vividly recall lectures, texts, arguments, art pieces, mine and others, linked to the ancient conjecture. I found this cascading effect to be immensely pleasurable, but sad, too. The past manifests in a sequence of memories, analogous to the behavior of water, its flow properties. Plato’s imaginary subterranean souls and their shadows are a staple of my artistic and philosophical construct, a foundation principle — not that I’ve adhered to it constantly, not at all. Bertolucci is right to apply the Platonic allegory towards the messiness of fictional assassination. Plus I adore the movie’s marvelous abased classicism, its visceral grittiness and sexy materialism, woven into the script, the production design and cinematography. The Conformist's relevance to 2026 geopolitics to me is obvious. Causality and interpretation are problematic differently, in violent dramas of desire. Time travel is the cheat code for all psychic illusion and fleshy fantasy.

If you follow my practice, you know I’m ever curious about dimensional platform dynamics and effects. Lately, my curiosity has me chasing albino rabbits in Meta fields. Yesterday I entered a string of prompts like “media theory” and “4d art and design,” and waded through the hate- and lust-infused slop, until the content stream’s flow shifted. Eventually the seam, the thread, led to Martin Heidegger. Maybe Heidegger was right about being - I don’t feel qualified to argue for or against his assertions. Nor do I know how to reconcile the old black and white interview displayed on my iPhone screen, with the 1000s of images before and following in the gram’s generative AI chain, the appropriately nicknamed “doomscroll.” Zizek and Kittler made cameos, me swiping, clicking away with my good left hand. Angelicicism/Film01 (now Sex mag) increases in significance daily, in my estimation. Major cine finds were The Battle of Algiers and Tarkovsky’s The Stalker. Takeaway: Displacement and disorientation are existential givens, the norm, over the past couple of millennia, and may have always been.

I was in Israel in the heat of summer in the early 80s at the caves near Qumran, where the Dead Sea Scrolls were discovered, on a field trip led by the then-spry little Englishman scholar and theologian called Joseph Blenkinsopp. The previous semester, I had signed up to work on an archaeological dig in Capernaum. Most of my Domer classmates preferred Eurail passes. On my formative journey to the Middle East, I took hundreds of pictures with a Nikon my dad gave me. Next stop, we visited the Dead Sea. I floated on its salty buoyant waters, careful to keep my damaged finger out of it. I had no nail on the middle one. A rock from a Roman wall had crushed the tip, but that’s another story about searing pain, the Chagall windows at Hadassah, the killing of the Son of God, Megiddo, the Israeli wars in Lebanon and Michael Jackson. Was mine a truly different Israel than today’s version, and how does either measure against the one polluting my Instagram, or the Michigan Senate race? My God, you would not believe today’s pixillated Holy Land’s shocking ugliness, brazenly churning in the sordid banality of the streams. Its depravity spreads like a plague of locusts to New Jersey, Paris, the Phillipines. Darkness unfathomable. The spectrum of stylized reactions, like Kabuki, or German Expressionist performances, or Baudrillard’s orgies, are consummately troubling. Because they situate grief, outrage, bloodlust and so on together in the attention market-machine. The entire apparatus is absolutely craven, a complicity vortex.

At the fringe of one night’s slumber, I reminisce about the artist Janet Lippincott, who was so kind to me when I was starting out. She bought me lunch at Babe’s on Canyon Road, a sandwich probably. [The quality of my reverie is variable, ranging from sharp particulars to fuzzy impressions.] Janet invited me to visit her Upper Canyon Road compound, with all those feral cats. I didn’t know how do get comfortable there, due to my substantial angst. Which is too bad, because the old gal was a gem. Janet and her paintings were fashioned of the the same indomitable spirit that defeated Hitler on the Western Front, A bloody stubbornness, angry and grieving all at once, repulsive and lonely, raw, bitter and deep. She was uniquely authentic to the bone, but unlike the so-called influencers, Janet achieved a persona the old fashioned way, through hard-lived experience, not pantomime. Periodically, the essence of freedom itself manifested in her art, which is not the same as beauty, exactly. Forgive me. Accidentally, I have resorted to telling a ghost story again. The American West, the High Desert, it absorbs and buries the 20th Century in its arroyos and shadows, like all the other times. At the risk of sounding metaphysical or poetic, Cormac McCarthy solved a semiotic iteration of the hypercube at the Santa Fe Institute, which is located about a mile away from where Janet lived, before expiring. I can’t get his books out of my head, especially the last couple, Stella Maris and The Passenger. Blood Meridian changed my concept of America forever.

In the afternoon I queried “the best of French and Italian cinema” and was rewarded with ranked lists. Zombie Hollywood remains in a state of collapse, while the mergers and acquisitions dominate entertainment news, with the sporadic blockbuster hype as a counterbalance to industrial atrophy and condemnation. This afternoon I watched Goddard’s Vivre sa vie. The brilliant cafe conversation (again Plato!) is magnificent and cruel. A paradigm lives within it, welding the infinite to the mortal flesh, sparkling in the tragic dialogue between a wizened thinker and a soon-to-be-murdered whore. The overlay of irony thick as cigarette smoke. Since the Stroke my mind is prone to ideological or aesthetic drifting. During these trauma-induced flights of fancy, LOL, it’s a matter of intellectual diligence, spiritual protection, or emotional discipline to veer away from despair and such negativities as the smog of malaise foists on a damaged brain. Grace must be invited and indulgence repelled, actively, on the daily. Truth be told, after the intensity of my days-long immersion in the algo-swamps and data-palaces, I am afraid art, literature, thought itself, are barreling toward extinction, along with the Real. Just an observation — not a preference, a diagnosis, not a prediction or prognosis. The future is not written, but it may be illiterate. I rediscover Noah Becker on IG, after a long separation, and rejoice.

n the mayhem of history’s prolonged suffering and demise, post-mortem (credit Fukuyama, Neitzsche, et al.), one circles back to Adam Curtis chatting mournfully with Dean Kissick behind a paywall, which I manage to breach. I don’t think either of them actually gets art as an artist does, effortlessly, which is to say, naturally. Yet, their observations are crucial, and devastating, in conjunction with or as an amplification of Curtis’s programs and Kissick’s recent critical essays. Inevitability — the ending of things — is in the air, isn’t it? The glorious and corruption-poisoned World Cup of 2026 and its blissful and tragic melodramas were a fantastic, if stunted, diversion. Messi. The interventions of tech, Trump and Madonna. The heat, ICE, the unavoidable subtext of diverse global terror, of ghastly stultifying inequity. Fright was attending the feast, but we again escaped with our skin intact.

In a wistful moment, I sought out the ghost of Martin Fuller, who was briefly my chum in New Mexico, during my downward spiral. I found I liked his art much more than I had nearly four decades ago. Playful works on paper are what I recall. Full disclosure: I was fanatical and extreme, even vicious, in my shallow and macho aesthetic judgements as an unaccomplished young artist. Not that I was often wrong, mind you, in the long run, which also holds true for Donald Judd, one could point out. Not to suggest my blustery hot takes were on par with his. I wonder if the head trauma, from the motorcycle crash, brawls and football violence (the American kind) exacerbated my volatility. Martin and I hung out a few times drinking at El Farol, And one night our revel was interrupted by the entrance of the poor lady who survived Jackson Pollack’s fatal crash, Ruth Kligman. She carried herself like a dead movie star. We Googled her, Lauren and I, and at first my memories didn’t match the results, until we found some photos of Kligman sporting dyed hair. On a side note: Do you know about the Sullivanians? How an evil psychoanalysis-saturated cult destroyed America’s greatest artist? I recommend the Art Angle podcast episode on the subject, hosted by my former editor Ben Davis. Anyway, I wish I’d gotten to see Martin’s studio in London, to visit his club, where he showed in the end. He told me stories about Francis Bacon holding forth there.

When I did visit South Kensington, the year was 1996. On a honeymoon stroll with my second wife Sophia, we happened across Francis Bacon’s studio. He was already deceased by then (1992)]. …Before that impenetrable maelstrom of mad inspiration (Bacon’s studio) was relocated and reopened in Dublin, Ireland in 2001. Preserved like a fossil in shale. And also that immensely entertaining plaque honoring Sir Charles James Freake, whom I unofficially adopted as my beloved spectral patron on the spot. This was at the start of what would become me Scottish Travelogue project, wherein I would reconnect with my extended kinfolk on the McLean side, propelled by the completion of my Hanbleceya obligations with Servando. Shaking off the loss of custody of my firstborn son, Will, after years of battles in family court. Not incidentally, I happened to be in Edinburgh for the return of the “Stone of Destiny,” an event met not by a cheering throng of proud Scots, but with massive, onerous and dour silence. From London we were bound for the Highlands and Islands. We were off to Oban, Mull. Staffa, Skye, Callanish, Glencoe, and many encounters and misadventures, culminating in a profusion of art and text created for exhibition and virtual publication.

I was sure, convalescing after the stroke, my productive artist life had ceased, as such, and my remaining time would be otherwise occupied. Now, I’m having second thoughts. Maybe I was too hasty. Suspended in the interstices of sleep and waking, I’ve been prone to envisioning fabrication sessions, and exhibitions, in tremendous detail. I experienced one such mirage Sunday. I built multimedia constructions from components that exist and are presently in storage nearby. These elements include large hybrid paintings in various stages of finish, to which I added (in my dreaming) layers of tinted Plexi, containing or decorative framing devices and touches of pigment, printed matter, modeling texture and so on; the mounting of small works collaged in series combining elements from previous productions, like CONTENT, Art for Humans Gallery Chinatown, DDDD/01/Journeyman Projects; a new collection sourced from my father’s photos and captions, as they appear compiled in his original scrapbooks, which chronicle our family and community life in Beckley, West Virginia, where I was born and raised.

The remainder of that Sabbath morning was devoted, after coffee, to advanced play with Instagram feeds, reels and algorithms. These purposeful engagements are underwritten by practical expertise and theoretical literacy. It’s a peculiar post-internet, post-contemporary technical approach, and crazy intense. Think Clockwork Orange mind-saturating, -configuring forced opticals. Interspersed with web crawls of former artsy acquaintances, friends, collaborators, influences, e.g., Hillary Foxworthy, Brent Stewart, John Mulvany, Jim Herrington, Tim Burton and others. I’m still in direct contact with some of them, the breathing, wired ones at least. I’m also chasing discourses tangential to art world trends with parallels in the broader intersecting fields of culture. I would add to the content-context mix politics, finance and system dynamics and effects, but that would improperly characterize my program as abstract to the point of meaninglessness or absurdity.

Code Duello 2 (detail), David Lusk Gallery Nashville, TN, 2014

On the contrary, I go granular, baby! In a very compressed metaphysical window, inside the perceptual uncanny of my Lord’s Day phantasmagoria,, I was able to piece together a representative summary, a snapshot, of my mediatic worldview, as a fluid, fractal thing in motion, timely, with both objective and subjective features, presented as a riddle whose answer will come in the form of an art-like response or the absence of one, something in the neighborhood of a signature on an untitled febrile assemblage or mosaic. Whether or not this speculation is realized, the vision itself improves my capacity to properly behave, to enact adequate morality, in the chaotic circumstances of the day. My personhood has perpetuated itself, somehow. Unfortunately for humanity, the Big Picture my weird process mapped in many respects is toxic, dire, unspeakably horrific. Humanity it seems is facing an extinction-level cataclysm, driven by commingling forces and factors, to some degree manmade and, in my view, supernaturally, preternaturally or unnaturally malevolent, which could be distinction without a difference. I can’t discern if that hyperbolic assessment sounds dumbly ambiguous, cliched and even milquetoast, or if it belies a vast well of truthiness. Who can tell, when there’s so much noise and shouting? Bottom line, I am convinced I have no interest in contributing to any panic, appropriate or not. Grinding axes is over for me.

Instead, the proposal on the table, so to speak, involves curation, creation and conservation in triangulation, the context of which is hemispheric. Fomenting a movement, as it were. A recent prime case in point is Kid A mnesiac, an exposition for complementary visuals by Thom Yorke and Stanley Donwood arrayed in an immersive installation energized by a classic Radiohead soundscape. In juxtaposition, as negation: A vacuous digital nihilism, a simulacra of lifey-ness masking the void; that would be Dataland, a Google joint fronted by Rafik Anadol, and a massive flex by the AI industrial complex. Both formulations occur or appear in the pop-up temporary-contemporary realms of soft power, propaganda, and consumer-oriented spectacle. One instance promotes a happy futurism, a smart screensaver, while the other is more accurately aligning with Ginsberg’s Howl — a generational crisis that unfolds as a dystopian cinematic nightmare. One encourages participation and wonder, the other resistance, as in “laying down,” until the moment for rising up arrives. Both are pointedly, materially impermanent. Culture as residue.

“Lost Causes,” The Anarchives/ the Spatial Occupation at Hyperallergic; Brooklyn , NY, 2012

Not long ago “vibes,” shortened from “vibrations,” which we could explore — a la the Beach Boys, science, etc. — registered style-wise in the hipster pantheon with buzz, status, popular traction. Dread is not a vibe in that sense, although they operate in the mass communication space similarly. What’s up with the latest phase of studied pretense of ambivalence, the neo-non-plus? Is this the sound of tuning out, a marker of informatics overload? A signal not of beats, but of our shared 99% beatdown experience? Its hard to be enthused at the prospects of free thought/speech/will/action/movement during wartime, in the midst of endemic poverty and ubiquitous infirmity, hunger, and the rest of the grim shite. When skies are darkened by smoke from wildfires, eruptions or bombs, it affects us instinctually, which is to say, as animals. You can follow the phenomenon in the feeds, the dread percolating, gaining momentum, accelerating into panic. The algos are the medium, in which fear is transmogrified and consumed, digested and converted into monopoly money, and into a mode of social energy, a raw resource to be refined and/or further redefined to who-knows-what end. The nifty procedural bit involves fabricating a fungible product from processing the equation fear + chaos = uncertainty to cover for rampant pillaging of the commons; that is not traceable to any agent cultivating a specific nefarious, self-aggrandizing outcome. Complication and convolution become camo for the narcissist class, the oligarchy.

A 4D media scan can be as easy as floating down a placid river on an inner tube, or as big a rush as riding class 5 western wilderness rapids with a crew of rowdy friends. Late one evening last weekend, I drifted into Vonnegut’s musings on Dresden in Slaughterhouse 5, turned a bend which put me in the trenches of the first world war, after which I cruised through battlefield Europe part two (narration this time provided by Tom Hanks, a/k/a Captain Miller), or two bazillion, depending on your chronological math. When is Europe not a war zone? About the Drift: one analog to my network dependent protocol would be my old pal John Guider’s habit of hopping in a canoe, splashing into the currents of an American waterway and seeing what happens, through a camera’s lens. I can extrapolate the same model maximally, and posit a thematic and structural linkage to mythos, to Ulysses in fact, whose epic drift is undoubtedly one of the most renowned, and sizzling hot again in 2026. The perpetual Oddysey. Kudos Elon Musk for threatening to bankroll a next-gen AI remake as an immaterial etnhic cleansing flex. Switching lanes: Shout out to the one and only Speed Levitch, and The Cruise, a masterpiece in the genre, and Linklater’s Waking Life. in which Levitch also graphically appears.

If I were to identify a common thread binding my latest meanderings, it would be the collective loss of trust apparent all round. With that loss comes the draining of joy and love from the everyday cycles of life. How realistic is any urge to spontaneity, to furtively enjoin with friends and neighbors in frivolities such as the arts, when civilization burns to ashes and disintegrates? What passes for fun in peacetime and seasons of plenty comes across as madness amidst catastrophe and lack. Struggle is no longer a sign of virtue — it is merely a trudge, a necessary qualification for survival, and no guarantee of anything at all. Faith and hope in relation to art must be reevaluated when contextualized within a framework that supports or at least permits apartheid, genocide or rampant impoverishment of the many, by the endlessly greedy and shameless few, and their minions. Worse yet, it feels like the most terrible among us are getting away with it! Revolution is therefore in the air again, which is to be expected when art has been strangled for the satisfaction of psychopathic despots, frolicking as they commit tyranny. Demanding we worship them, or at least like them, gazing upwards from under the boot.

AFH Update 2026 Plus Links

The Artist in his Nashville Studio, 1998. Photo by Rebecca Walk

Greetings!

In May 2025 I suffered a stroke, which necessitated our moving to Petaluma, CA. My right side was affected, which means I will have to undergo significant rehabilitation to regain functionality in my limbs. Fortunately, I retained my intellectual faculties such as they are. Sufficed to say, it has been a tremendous challenge to deal with the loss of my ability to paint at the level I was painting prior to the stroke. We are exploring ways in which I can continue to be creative and express myself in 4D objects and texts. I’m proud to announce that the Rauschenberg Foundation awarded me with an emergency medical grant for which we are very grateful. We are also very thankful to friends, family, and supporters for providing essential contributions to help over the past couple of years.

I thought this would be a good time to invite you to explore the numerous projects and exhibitions I have created over the years, catalogued online.

Here are some links to get you started:

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