I thought of this as a pilgrimage, in the late sixties, early seventies, to visit Clarence Schmidt and the tumult of his demesne in Woodstock, New York. He was the chief “outsider” artist, famous all over the country, his life
Eating Dog/ Talking Turkey
I The billboards stun me as we enter Communist China. Years before when I crossed into East Berlin through Checkpoint Charlie, before the wall went down, the sudden lack of commercial advertising I found relaxing though the absence of color
Grace Lee Boggs’ Message to Occupy Wall Street – 10/9/11
Grace Lee is a Los Angeles based filmmaker of both documentary and fiction films. She is currently in production on the feature documentary AMERICAN REVOLUTIONARY: the evolution of Grace Lee Boggs, about 96-year-old Detroit philosopher and activist Grace Lee Boggs.
Reckonings
When navigating by dead reckoning, it’s important to start from a known point, time; time to give the queen a bath. A point. Start from a point, a needle: A compass bats its metal lash. Make the queen’s skirts. Make
A Forgotten Picture
The new library downtown was larger than the previous downtown library, filled with shelf after shelf, all unmarked. Even the sections were unmarked. The floors, too. The woman at the information desk told me that the city had cut the
Sex is for Children
One really important thing Freud was wrong about: He was right to say that there is childhood sexuality, but he was wrong to assume that there is adult sexuality. Sex is where we go when we want to flee the
I Went and Saw Me Some Spiderman
The following was originally published at Pitchfork Media on Monday, May 20th, 2002. It has since been taken down, and I’mgrateful to William Bowers for permission to reprint it here. With the latest Spider-Man movie now gracing our theaters, ten
PING:
The balmy faucet sounds of plastic. There–in their room–their upholstered bodies they learned under the ground glass their roomy temporal selves–a perpetual tense–holding in of a cough. HERO:There is a fly a housefly no a firefly a lightning bug no
Bad Mother: A Story in Five Paragraphs
Once there was a woman with four children under the age of ten: two boys, two girls; two blond, two dark; two boisterous, two subdued. When the eldest complained that she loved him the least, she said, “No, no. That’s
Kin
I brought the girls cigarettes and magazines. Everyone told me not to; the doctors were quite clear. They’re dying, I said to the orderly who saw me slipping these treasures out from beneath my oversized black smock. She shook her