Patriotic Painting, 2006
mixed media on canvas
40”x30”
This playlist is a companion to my 80s coming-of-age novel, Your Silent Face. Stuart Page is a protagonist obsessed with 80s New Wave and Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Divison. All of the tunes and bands in the playlist get a mention in the novel. The novel is available on Amazon.
A third Blade Runner poem is coming soon. I am also making progress on a new painting. And I am reading a very interesting book: The Long 1980s. I am also reading Malina, by Ingeborg Bachmann, and The Cyborg Manifesto, by Donna J. Haraway. Also, watched Stop Making Sense the other night. It holds up.
Oh, and I am reading Philip K. Dick’s final interview, which in part has also been fueling the Blade Runner poems.
This playlist is a companion to my 80s coming-of-age novel, Your Silent Face. Stuart Page is a protagonist obsessed with 80s New Wave and Ian Curtis, the lead singer of Joy Divison. All of the tunes and bands in the playlist get a mention in the novel. The novel is available on Amazon.
I always paint in series. I guess I’m writing a poetry series, now, too. Here’s another Blade Runner poem. The films (Blade Runner and Blade Runner 2049) fascinate me to no end.
As usual, the poem is mine, but I do not own any rights to the image.
#BladeRunner2049 #BladeRunner #ryangosling #contemporaryart #contemporarypoetry #poetry #lovelansing #GenX #cyberpunk #philipkdick #doandroidsdreamofelectricsheep #thebladerunnerpoems
It has become pretty clear to me that I have begun working on a new series of poems inspired by the Blade Runner films, and by Philip K. Dick’s last interview which was published under the title What If Our World Is Their Heaven. Naturally, I have started referring to these new poems as the Blade Runner poems.
The Impostor
for Agent KD6-3.7
In Blade Runner,
Rachel’s childhood memory—
of baby spiders
hatching from a spider’s
egg before
devouring the mother—
have been
implanted, are like
newts
wriggling under the
thin skin of her
wrist. Androids, of course,
are engineered,
do not have mothers.
Rachel falls in love
with the central character
who hunts down
rogue androids—
& she suffers.
A devoted mother
might have
warned her not to fall
in love with a murderer. Might have
breezed into her
room & swept away the
nastiness of the
spider living outside the
window. In his final
interview, Philip K. Dick
claims to have
written the first story
about an android
that believes it is human.
The cruel
revelation comes
as a shock,
just as it did for Rachel.
Just as a salamander
wriggling under one’s
skin might
paralyze one with
bone-chilling
fear. The title of Dick’s
story is “The Impostor.”
I am
warning you,
all of us have hatched
painful moments
we can’t undo or recognize.
Once implanted,
you would do well
to destroy those
memories.
#BladeRunner2049 #BladeRunner #ryangosling #contemporaryart #contemporarypoetry #poetry #lovelansing #GenX #cyberpunk #philipkdick #doandroidsdreamofelectricsheep #thebladerunnerpoems
I don’t read out very often anymore, but I do enjoy making these recordings. I hope you enjoy this recording of my new poem, “Perhaps I Am a Program Watching a Film Starring Androids, Humans & Beautiful Facsimiles.” Written after watching Blade Runner 2049 for the fourth or fifth time.
I have watched Blade Runner many times. A time will come when I can say that I have watched Blade Runner 2049 many times. In both films, I always find myself empathizing for the replicants. Think about that for a second. Empathizing for machines. How? Why? I’m fine with it. I am rooting for them.
We are capable of mistreating anything and everybody. The mistreatment of machines (AI) is going to be the end of us someday, or at least radically change human existence. We’re radically changing human existence, as it is. Some of it for the worst; some of it for the best. The best is perhaps always driven by the worst. What would happen if we stopped mistreating people, animals, things, the planet, ourselves? Would we flourish? Are we afraid to find out?
#BladeRunner2049 #BladeRunner #ryangosling #contemporaryart #contemporarypoetry #poetry #lovelansing #GenX #cyberpunk #philipkdick #doandroidsdreamofelectricsheep #thebladerunnerpoems
I think it is pretty appropriate that on Loving Day, I have sold two paintings that explore my Ojibwe identity. Thank you for the love and support.
Both paintings are from the Double-Universe Topology series. In this series, I was thinking about what it is like to present, and be perceived, one way while identifying another. Living with an identity duality or multiplicity that creates tension within the history of our flawed society. The suppression of family heritage for whatever reason. Or opting out of embracing an identity as an injurious, subconscious coping mechanism for avoiding offending family.
Perhaps I Am a Program Watching a Film Starring Androids, Humans & Beautiful Facsimiles
—on watching Blade Runner 2049 for the 4th or 5th time
I will not reveal which scene
sent me to the kitchen, why I found myself
staring from the window above
the sink,
& turning slightly to my right,
with the quirks of a well-trained
actor, or an actual glitching android,
selected the ripe tomato on the
cutting board,
held it up—calculating
weight—felt its texture—guessing what the
skin holds inside.
I inhaled its grassy scent.
Suppose for a moment
media is already more real than the physical data
our senses collect—I mean why else baptize each night
with such religiosity? Repetition. Blue light. Ones
& zeroes.
What would it be to slice the tomato
three hundred sixty times in less than twenty
seconds without cutting yourself? Carve the luscious
fruit into a hyper-
realistic miniature St. Bernard in less
than the twitch of a nervous tick—
an eye bearing the serial number
of your make & model,
your maker.
I wonder if acting techniques are relevant any
longer—Classical, Stanislavski, Method—& where
Ryan Gosling fits into these molds.
Is it acting?
In the kitchen,
I imagined a deleted scene from
Blade Runner 2049. Created separation.
A buffer between the irony & disappointment
intertwined like DNA in the scene which
I will not name.
Imagined a scene
where I become Ryan Gosling slicing a
tomato—
sync with Ryan Gosling
like a pair of headphones
or a wireless speaker.
These android films,
if they’re any good,
are always about the irony.
I painstakingly slice the tomato.
Add it to a boring salad. I realize
this kitchen could be
a simulation.
The idea is as tantalizing as all the cyber punk films,
an off world planet pushing language & boundaries, a futuristic
willingness to look hard or away at what it might mean
to be as decent—more human than human—as
some of these androids.
#BladeRunner2049 #BladeRunner #ryangosling #contemporaryart #contemporarypoetry #poetry #lovelansing #GenX #cyberpunk #philipkdick #doandroidsdreamofelectricsheep #thebladerunnerpoems
Harrison Ford and Ryan Gosling in BLADE RUNNER 2049 (Sony)
I recently spent some time at the Broad Art Lab in East Lansing, learning a new technique while taking advantage of the lab’s cool studio features, such as the press. The best thing that came out of this session was a negative, or ghost print, of a trace mono print that didn’t come out as well as I had hoped. The negative came out super though; I was happy. This print is 12”x8.75” I am including an image of the print below.
