My daughter wondered if I could learn this dance. I sent her this video twenty minutes later. Not my best work, but definitely one of my best shirts.
First Contact /
It sort of feels like the future is here, doesn’t it? I am both enthralled and scared to death by the idea of looking up one calm, temperate day while hiking to witness their poised and silent arrival.
First Contact is a new painting—my first of 2020. I guess my mind is still preoccupied with thoughts of the future, space and parallel time lines. This painting can be viewed in The Sublime gallery, or in the Art for Sale section. You have to wonder in how many different time lines they’ve actually already arrived.
Click on the image or content link below to enter the gallery.
Fog Tropes: Ingram Marshall /
I am very happy this morning. After several days of risking the swirling, foggy depths of memory, I stumbled upon a New Age artist I had been trying to remember. The CD (called Portraits) is long gone. But the beautiful, haunting sounds have stayed with me. Ingram Marshall’s Fog Tropes blew me away when I discovered it at Wherehouse Records or Flat, Black & Circular some time back in the late 80s while I was in college.
This live performance is amazing. I can’t help thinking back to conversations with Bonnie Dee and Brian about the French horn, and various trumpeters, when I worked at Curious Books in the late 90s/early 2000s.
You might also enjoy the gallery of The Sublime series, which seems connected.
A Screen-less Window /
I wonder if anyone has serialized a novel on a blog. It’s an idea. Here’s a passage from my novel, Your Silent Face. The editing process is almost complete.
Sometimes I’d roll up on Nigel’s house when it was deathly still, but I’d find him in there, draped across his bed, reading Surrealist poetry or analyzing chess problems in the weak light filtering through his screen-less bedroom window. “Hey, man, what’s up?” he’d say, as if I had been downstairs making scrambled eggs. Other times I’d knock and let myself in and find myself confronted with all the usual signs of an East-sider’s evening—images from the TV flashing across the wall in the living room, a record playing on the stereo in his bedroom, a half-empty 40oz-er of Stroh’s beside the bed, and in his case, a piece of typing paper in a half-cocked typewriter—but it would be as if he’d been kidnapped by drug lords, or had spontaneously combusted.
People Enacting the Behaviors of Urban Animals /
This is the only time I’ve ever really delved into a serious photo series. I used to shoot black and white film on a Minolta X-300, but that was for fun. The idea for this series came about after the housing bubble burst. People were desperate. I tried to call attention to this.
Enjoy the gallery. These prints are available in the Art for Sale section.
Things Having to Do with Lilac /
The days no longer really seem to have a beginning, middle and end. More like each day just feels like returning to interrupted, previously scheduled programming. I think any semblance of a regular schedule evaporated yesterday. Still can’t really be creative, but I did burn through Don DeLillo’s novel, White Noise. Truly a masterpiece of contemporary American fiction. The dude called it. And he could see why something like this was coming. I guess you have to be able to see the warning signs in order to predict the future. Otherwise, it’s just a guess. So now I’ve turned to reading The Plague, by Albert Camus, for the third or fourth time. I’m really bummed that I can’t get my hands on the new translation by Robin Buss. I’ve heard good things about it. If only I had a can of lilac-colored spray paint, I could get to work on that painting in the studio.
Poem /
April Snow
The neighborhood is adorned with dog shit
dead leaves, ugly snow
what we want
what we get
It’s fifty-two
degrees I will walk my fear of death
up to the corner of Michigan & Clematis
& abandon it
like an unwanted pet
Like a hungry stray
it follows me home
It pains me
to stack the days
unread
books on a nightstand next to our bed
so we can refer to them
occasionally
while the sun parts
two clouds &
spits
—spring, 2006
Photo credit: Kierstyn Lamour
No Werewolves in My Back Yard /
I am not a slam poet, or a spoken word poet, but I truly believe that all systems of poetry are generally meant to be heard. “Some Truths” straddles genres a bit, I guess: part page poem, a bit of spoken word. When I write page poem, I mean that the way the poem looks on the page was important in its construction.
I hope you enjoy it. It was originally published in an e-chap called Pure Pop which was put out by Revelator Press (many thanks to those folks forever). Coming to yoursilentface.com soon.
For now, some truths.
