ethnographies from the road
No. 9 & 15
The stranger with his flat axe of copper comes to trade in the village where his axe-shine trumps flint, stone, bone, antler. Now, what fool wants to be buried with ivory beads and clay pots? No more communal burials with women crying over barrows. Each man to his own grave, and as many grave goods [...]
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And this is how you wear a sock over your head: stretch & cotton-sweat, lips coy as petals, whetted then struck by a barbarous tugging— smell of grass, of cinnamon, of aftershave still on scuttling hand. I live in denim musk, a clam unshelled and flowering in classroom, lockerroom, bathroom stall— I live to enthrall […]
Artist’s statement TINT TINT is the product of my constant inquiry into legacy - the problems posed by people or knowledge that lingers in the historical record. I create texts which are manipulated through the use of modern technology such as language algorithms or graphics-editing programs questioning aged or archaic knowledge as both information and [...]
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An invasive plant has the ability to thrive and spread aggressively outside its natural range. -- “What is an Invasive Plant?," The United States National Arboretum My convent school in Manila was founded more than seventy years ago by a French-Canadian nun who, like Moses, Joan of Arc, or many schizophrenics, had been given a [...]
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Artist’s statement Ethnography: Staten Island Ferry I spent a long afternoon shuttling back and forth on the ferry between Manhattan and Staten Island and constructed this piece out of found recordings, inspired by the—oftentimes profoundly banal—commute, which assumes a radically different energy only when the ferry passes handsome Lady Liberty. As an “ethnography,” an ostensibly [...]
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Winter Of (And I Took the Chemise Off) And I said to him You are such an atomist and I took the chemise off the canal had a scrim of green the kestrel between my shoulder blades kept worrying its nest worrying and worrying till I grew bored with it I said My acedia will [...]
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Primate Problems In this game, the Princess is supposed to save Mario. In this one, the Gorilla has a thing for guys with mustaches. Nobody’s happy. How it works is things don’t work out, but the game keeps on going. A sequence of binary code sputters in the back of each skull like the rusty [...]
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Omnipresence is an Evolutionary Talent The anhinga at the shore of the man-made lake opens its wings and just stands there like an idea being considered. I’m in the mirror. The thought moves from one fingertip to another. The anhinga lands here, inside the house, on my shoulders. The duck with the red face is [...]
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A Kind of Parallel to Hedgerows Forming a Sort of Schism Between Well-Meaning Folks and Their Grand Estates It’s like that sort of parable, right, of the lawnmower circumnavigating a marble fountain, wherein just as he does a pass in his white coveralls the grass shoots back up behind him, such that his whole day [...]
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