Here’s what happened: 8:01 p.m., May 4th, 2015, and we’re standing in the Emeryville Mudflats, that beautiful nowhere between Oakland and the Bay Bridge, performing what’s left of Sophocles Sinon. And when I say “what’s left,” I mean four words. Four fucking words that survived 2,400 years while empires rose and burned and we landed on […]
Continue Reading →Here’s some deadwood resurrected into myth: The thing squats there in the mudflats like prophecy rotting in real-time, all salt-bleached femurs and vertebrae of piers that gave up the ghost decades ago. We dragged this trash out of the bay’s digestive tract and said, “Yeah, this is how you sneak doom into a city.” Driftwood. […]
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Here’s the thing about standing in the Pacific at dawn, reciting words that haven’t been heard in their original context for two-and-a-half goddamn millennia: you’re probably insane. Or maybe that’s the only sane response to a world that’s forgotten how to have actual experiences that aren’t mediated through a screen or commodified into bite-sized chunks […]
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Fierce and pure, I was the theater of a fairyland restored to life. Jean Genet, The Thief’s Journal Here’s the thing about Genet that nobody wants to admit at a museum opening with the wine and cheese: the motherfucker understood that we’re all whores. Not metaphorically … actually. We’re all selling some version of ourselves, […]
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Everything has two aspects: the current aspect, which we see nearly always and which ordinary men see, and the ghostly and metaphysical aspect, which only rare individuals may see in moments of clairvoyance and metaphysical abstraction. Giorgio de Chirico (1919) Artists on Art – from the 14th – 20th centuries, ed. by Robert Goldwater and […]
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Shakespeare’s Sonnet 1 is basically a passive-aggressive guilt trip dressed up in iambic pentameter. “From fairest creatures we desire increase”, translate that from Elizabethan for what it really means: you’re too goddamn beautiful to keep it all to yourself, so make a baby already. But here’s Ava on my boat, reciting this thing, and neither […]
Continue Reading →Solipsism sphere on Rocinante…. There is nothing more enticing, disenchanting, and enslaving than the life at sea. Joseph Conrad, Typhoon
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