In the early 1940s, my grandfather raised homing pigeons in a small town in rural Virginia. During the Second World War, he was a conscientious objector and refused to fight. He was sent to a work camp in Virginia. He left behind his pigeons. His wife – my grandmother – bore the full burden of...
Read more »
I arrived in Munich in a rainy winter’s June morning, and twenty-four hours later was on the train out of Marienplatz and bound for Dachau. In a place made for destroying people, I was startled to see it filled and humming with plump, colorful, warm and fed and well-dressed and very much alive and...
Read more »
There is so much gas we can barely breathe. They call it drilling for oil, but it’s a gunshot wound through the flesh of this earth. Mind the children. Behind their portholes are eyes. The only skin exposed is on our hands and knees, as though at some point we might return to all...
Read more »
So I’m quite thrilled about this upcoming concert at Boston Court Performing Arts Center in Pasadena, where my video installation will appear as part of a collaboration between several artists and arts institutions, including Catalysis Projects and People Inside Electronics. Of course I’m biased, but it’s a lovely wee multidisciplinary hijinx of a night...
Read more »
I heard news today from Lithuanian friends about the Gay Pride Tolerance Parade in Vilnius this afternoon – the first parade of its kind in the history of Lithuania that took place under pressure from the EU community, despite 75% disapproval by Lithuanians. Any substantive gay rights organizing has long been banned by the same government...
Read more »
Another buttonhole in time for us, stitched lovingly and with an embroiderer’s thread, binding then to now, and now to later. Us to them. A German soldier carries his birds through the bombed out hayfields of Holland – on his back a small prison for birds, who can gaze out not at what is...
Read more »
Ah, archives, your fragile treasures await our quests of conscience. Little images, long forgot. These white carrier pigeons headed to the Russian front, their brot-und-wasser now away long gone, their Nazi chauffeurs fore to aft ashed to ashed, and then dust-to-dusted. Oh! What ho! A resurrection! Here we are, in the 21st century, and...
Read more »
emotions are conditions / conditions can be adverse / adversity does not create compassion / compassion is an emotion /
Read more »
At a certain age, my bones began stretching out far and fast. I uncannily evolved from a compact creature to a spindly, spidery sort of being. Fast-growing bones are searing – a kind of carbolic burn. Chemical, electric, and primordial. All appendages were tense and unpredictable. The skin attempted to bridge each day’s new...
Read more »
I must again mention Andrew Joron’s splendid Cry At Zero: “Pulling apart the lips of a white page reveals a curious network of fine bones, like those of an abstract bird…” (Fate Map, p. 21.) As though reading is an archeological exploration of anatomy, an intimate violation, an intrepid excursion into a private civilization...
Read more »
Here is another collaborative picture-poem between me and brother-of-Bumblemoth in Germany, Paetrick Schmidt. I wrote this for him in deep winter, in Strasbourg, a sweet city of spirits and smoke. It was a dreary and delightful day of crystalline drizzle. A thousand layers of wool were not enough to block the cold, and yet...
Read more »
Pigeons can recognize themselves in mirrors. Humans think we can as well, but it’s possible that we recognize what we look like, but not who we are. This battlefield photograph from the National Archive of the Netherlands documents a British soldier releasing a carrier pigeon from a tank on the Western Front in France....
Read more »
