Before Sunrise

in the wee hours
before sunrise —
skin on skin
spooning, breathing
we are stirring —
first me, then her
under a blanket
of bones
on a mossy, solitary
riverbank, not far
beyond the city walls
the night of inky blue
moon risen & gone
— in the frosty air
she and I clinging
to one another, close
drifting through
the fleeting magic
enjoining dreaming
with this new day
telling secrets
in hushed tones
being entwined
& silly, in love
black waters bubbling,
splashing over rounded
stone — in due time
behold! the dawn chorus

Stricken Part 4A

Dreams
by Langston Hughes
Hold fast to dreams
For if dreams die
Life is a broken-winged bird
That cannot fly.
Hold fast to dreams
For when dreams go
Life is a barren field
Frozen with snow.

A. Void Visitor

[Recap] When I started writing Stricken, I envisioned an account of stroke survival. Things, as they are wont to do, veered sidewise. In the closing sections of Part 3, “stricken” assumes a variant referential meaning. The shift in focus initiates a dimensional reflection on erasure, stuff being stricken from the record, as it were. The subject, an existential one, can be approached from any number of directions. Death and memory, absence or impermanence, temporality and transition, states of being, ideal form… Philosophy, broadly, poses and and seeks to answer questions we have about the residue of action, in tandem with ethics, presumably to incentivize generally desirable behavior. The imagination becomes a means for the modeling of reality, by prioritizing and directing our engagements in life, honing the mind to govern doing. Where we are picking up the thread is beyond these foundational concerns. Stricken addresses aggression against the archive, against historical accuracy, representation, the real, authenticity… Forceful negation being exerted on the pressure points through which consciousness flows toward movement, activity that effects change.

I come to the project primarily through art, but my perspective is colored by an appreciation for oral tradition, and a primitive regard for the conductive properties of dreaming. Art talk and dreams play a substantial role in my art life, which is true for many others, expressing themselves through a tremendous variety of genres and eras, all over the place. I’m coy above, to call dreaming “conductive.” The implication is that dreams deliver something from somewhere to here. What do I know? It’s true that for decades, since my early 20s, I have sought to satisfy my curiosity on the topic. What conclusions have I reached? Why, none at all! And I’m not alone in my ambivalence. No consensus exists on the phenomenon of dreaming, what it means or does. Dream analysis is ancient, and new theories about its meaning, function and value sprout up all the time, to this day. Oneirology is a fascinating field of study, associating the unconscious (Jung, Freud) with symptomatic physiology (e.g., REM). Whether or not dreaming conforms to any logic or causality, or evades the proof rationality demands, we (humans) refuse to fully marginalize it in an increasingly mechanized and secular world. Collectively, we do wonder about the latest technologies, however. Because we’re alternately thrilled and terrified by the prospects of enlightened, sentient robots, we ask if the advanced systems are self-aware, and moreover, are these thing-beings dreaming? This bizarre transference, shifting our age-old fascination with dreams to humanoid contraptions, I think is exceedingly weird. Art, strangely enough, makes the conundrum of machine dreaming preposterous. Plenty of people appear to accept AI-generated content as art. This is also baffling to me. Dreams and art share an intractable commonality with respect to origination, which evades definition in the formality of language. The poetic and technical aspects of both are fodder for perpetual discourse and innovation, yes, but ultimately wordplay does not meet the challenge. The symbolic is a by-product of their convergence, but a painting cannot only be a symbol of some other thing. Art persists as itself.

In 2026, the pressure on our creative faculties is astounding and disturbing. Authoritarianism decides what is permissible to dream, create and discuss. In the maximally complex post-contemporary society, there are an infinite number of ways to impinge on expression. Power/wealth asymmetry and the organized surveillance/enforcement networks unleash an increasingly robust apparatus for interrupting the conceptual-expressive process. It’s a hybridized, dimensional phenomenon, that can yet be traced and apprehended by a normal citizen, with a rudimentary education and limited access to information. The Net in America for the moment allows a user to obtain a working historical knowledge of what’s what quickly, though malevolent misinformation and fakery abound. The most recent celebrated case of outright censorship involves billionaire Robert Kraft and a cabal of stadium owners, the media (all), and a handful of international pop music performers. The central issues of infringement on Constitutionally protected free speech are in play. This is an important opportunity to correct course on the degradation of American democracy. Already clear is the incredibly potent rapid-response of the key players, including massive cross-sector corporate damage control operations, implicating a foreign government (Israel). The timing is critical. American midterm elections are barely two months away. Public backlash against the Zionist lobby for Israel is accelerating. Trump and Netanyahu (the Israeli PM) are controversially speaking at the United Nations, while thousands protest outside. Social media platforms are pushing narratives that diverge wildly from messaging on legacy or “mainstream” platforms, and the former is moving the needle more than the latter. M-/Billions of dollars are at stake. The consumer creative industrial complex is exposed, and its ugliness is linkable to the contingent domains of pro sports, government subsidies, talent agencies and Wall St.

The entertainment sector intermixes the business and pleasure of the luxe and popular classes, as none other can. “Entertainment” is becoming fungible, like speech and money. Hollywood’s Dream Machine has metastasized, consuming practically all aspects of human life, our culture, private lives, community rituals, even our reproduction. Baudrillard’s analysis of hyperreality is a perfunctory vision, in the rearview mirror. The profuse radicalism of the Continental Theorists, Frankfurt School and ‘68ers seems quaintly decrepit in 2026. Stardom itself has spawned a perspectival deluge, a mimetic pandemic , a state of dramatic becoming being performed 24/7/365 all over the world by any- and everyone with a fast internet/social media connection, a camera, microphone and idea. The fourth wall has dissolved, and the formula life=art has manifested. The fleeting sensation of euphoria has evaporated, exposing the vast panopticon constructed to contain billions of lives and dreams to facilitate the wholesale suck of value and meaning from them. Parallel to this plantation model, an artificial and symbolic idealization of society is erected, a projection of impossible, irrational promise. The multimedia spectacle competition-lottery, promulgating the myths of talent, meritocracy, heroes and villains, in a miasma of sex and sparkling fashion.

Take the extreme financialization of youth sports in the USA, From this phenomenon, we can access an emergent networked global pro athletics schema linked by money/media/power to industrial gambling consortia, apparel giants and syndicated education, etc. The extraordinary concentration and integration of existence into an omni-market is revolutionary. The professionalization and/or privatization of culture coincides with the general trend of monopolization/absorption across all sectors in society since the eighties at least. Elitism has been rehabilitated through effective aspirational marketing. The top 1% — musicians, artists, athletes — are fabulously compensated, and in turn are expected to conform to the rapacious program of K-shaped post-capitalistic economy. Failure to do so can result in immediate cancellation by owners, consortiums, compliant press etc.

POTUS last week banned several major journalistic outfits from White House access, then promptly launched a state media channel for disseminating curated content, Trump’s “greatest hits.” One of the clever obscurations in the affair involves the blurring of distinctions among domains of public interest and exchange, all of which rely on trust, reciprocation and fulfillment on promise. These “spaces” include speech, commerce, politics and entertainment, all of which the President considers himself to be a master of, an all-time great. America elected this man to its highest office not once, but twice. To understand how and why requires a massive and thorough, dimensional and historical examination of the phenomenal/manufactured perfect storm that brought DJT to Amerca’s highest office…two times… This cringey project is worthwhile, in my estimation, only if it results in immediate corrective action. I recognize that he proposition frankly is absurd, a fool’s errand, Quixotic, because, as we know, the resources to mount such an effort no longer are democratically available. Furthermore, a devastatingly efficient campaign is underway to replace humanity’s ability to pursue an understanding of itself, and exercise that comprehension kinetically. So, what’s the point, man?

As an artist, I don’t have to have one, LOL. Art has been categorically dismissed on the basis of utility for centuries on semantic grounds. Let’s lean into that sentiment. The proponents of uselessness for art unsurprisingly have served at the discretion of monarchs, religions and states for command and control of the many by the few. There’s a fine line dividing the non-essential/utile thing and its complicity in a post-imperial/colonial/feudal revival. Art emerged over time as a vital indicator of the health of a society’s free speech ecosystem. The superiority posture of the wordist over the artist dates to Plato at least — an oddity, since the former’s contingency on the latter’s autonomy is elemental to functional democracy. The computer reduces both to zeroes and ones, which themselves are key to arithmetic and algebra, and — need it be said? —the forging of civilization from whatever preceded it. Now, the big question in the back of everyone’s mind is What survives civilization’s collapse? Bezos, Musk, et al., as we noted, are building rocket ships, space stations and bunkers. Meantime, superciliously, Trump wants a rebrand for AI, which has hit a rough patch with the hoi poloi. He would rather we say “super intelligence,” when describing the commodification of metadata, machine learning, killing drones, large language models, ETFs, Flock camera arrays and other mass surveillance tools, and so on and on. The trick is to link the fiction of artificial personhood with speech with money under the pretense and pretext that that specific tri-partheid configuration constitutes the embodiment of fact, which naturally is truthful, or tantamount to it. Belief and all that goes into it dissolves into this sentient non-entity like sugar in coffee. This is the Beast, the golem, of the post-contemporary drift towards planetary cataclysm. The scheming crazies all fantasize a happy ending for only them and theirs, but the disastrous fix is in, and it’s an alchemical/metaphysical double-cross. The rot of excess gobbles the mirage of future returns, even as the fires, floods, hurricanes, pestilences, etc., decimate the beneficiary class, their properties and delicate, idealized Self-hood, which they wish to perpetuate indefinitely… [POOF] Suckers! I hate to be gloating and pessimistic simultaneously. Talking about those Masters of the Universe/War: They’re gonna get us all killed, and they apparently couldn’t care less, because in their addled brains they will live forever, as futuristic Pharaohs, sporting smart glasses and riding self-driving magic carpets to art fairs in Valhalla or Timbuktu, a hot babe cyborg on each regenerated haptic arm, flexing!

PLATES

The Pattern Series was created for the CONTENT Cycle, which I launched while an MFA student at Claremont Graduate University and continued to develop for a solo exhibition at Yarger|Strauss Contemporary in Beverly Hills in the late 2000s.

Autumn Returns

Poème d’Automne
by Langston Hughes
The autumn leaves
Are too heavy with color.
The slender trees
On the Vulcan Road
Are dressed in scarlet and gold
Like young courtesans
Waiting for their lovers.
But soon
The winter winds
Will strip their bodies bare
And then
The sharp, sleet-stung
Caresses of cold
Will be their only
Love.

Lula 44

Today is my beautiful wife Lauren’s birthday, and I painted this, inspired by her. I’m so grateful and fortunate to have a love like hers. We’ve shared a lot of years, joy and tears, traveled many miles and been blessed with a wonderful son. Here’s to another loop around the sun, to dear friends and family, and, God willing, one more day! — PJM

Orchard

The Orchard
9” x 12”
Ink on Paper
2026
$250

[This (I believe) is my 9th post-stroke “Lefty” painting. Thanks to all of you who have shown support, which includes donations for art supplies, art purchases, encouraging messages and likes/clicks. So grateful! TBH, the arthritis makes the whole operation tough, but your love and positivity helps tremendously!]

Peace & Beauty

From Petaluma

PJM

Milan Miracle 1951

Milan Miracle [1951]
12” x 9”
Ink on Paper
2026
$250

Lefty 8

Left Hand Painting, Monday Morning
9” x 12”
Ink on Paper
2026
$250

Posithetica Plus Five

Occupy 2021: POSITHETICA: The Final Art for Humans MEGAzine by Paul McLean

Five years ago [September 2021] I posted Posithetica on the Art for Humans nexus site, which was called Mystic Novad. In America alone, the Covid-19 pandemic had surpassed 47 million cases and claimed 700,000 lives. It was the 10th anniversary of Occupy Wall Street, in which I participated, as the co-organizer of Occupy with Art. It was also the 20th Anniversary of 9/11. I had devoted much of the decade [2011-21] to doctoral studies at the European Graduate School, a course I would finally abandon, for several reasons. In the studio, I was focused on the VyNIL Cycle of paintings. Concurrently, I was publishing a series of virtual exhibits and essays online, using several Web 2.0 platforms and the AFH constellation of sites.
The MEGAzine format evolved over two decades of distributing content on the Net, starting in the mid-90s. It became my preferred mode of multimedia exchange, often serving as a complement to IRL creative projects and a vehicle for critical writing on art, culture and much more. By the early 2020s the capture of the World Wide Web by Big Tech, its pervasive enshittification (Doctorow), reduced the online experience to addictive anti-social/-democratic doomscrolling, hot-takes, and the grotesquerie of the influencer phenomenon. Relentless and consumptive commercialization, part of a neo-fascist program of exploitation and extraction, attached directly to the industrial surveillance state, had basically strangled the early promise of a globally integrated Internet society. Posithetica is a bittersweet, book-length reflection on this era.
To revisit this material today is more poignant, as a stroke survivor, because it accentuates the realization that creative production is finite. I doubt I’ll ever be able again to devote the energy and resources such a massive project demands. Furthermore, my perspective on Occupy 2021/Posithetica is colored significantly by the accelerated unraveling of my beloved country’s democratic experiment, since the MEGAzine’s publication. In 2021, I remained hopeful that an effort like mine could reach a sufficient audience, gain traction and have positive impact. I suppose even today that still is true, because I follow the good works of New Models, Angelicism and Joshua Citarella/Do.Not.Research and others. It is my fervent appeal to you to take the time to read and explore Posithetica, though you might find it challenging — noting that I would be disappointed, if you weren’t challenged by it. After all, that was its purpose! And be so kind as to share it, because that is in keeping with the spirit in which it was composed.
Love,
PJM
September 2026

SELECTED PLATES

[For image info, follow the link to Occupy 2021/Posithetica, by clicking the cover illustration at top ^]

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