Writer / performer / artist. Hudson Valley / Chicago / various deserts Reorientation Studies can be found at featherproofbooks.tumblr.com. See also: Pillars and Tongues, Dark Dark Dark, Bilîn Wake, Drekka.
By Mark Trecka Inside the Saddle and Spur Tavern in Douglas, Arizona, it is easy to forget that about a mile south down G Street, just past the Douglas Meat Warehouse, the United States ends and Mexico begins. It is easy to forget that the U.S.-Mexico border is a mile away even though the Saddle and Spur doubles as the Gadsden Hotel’s bar. Opened in 1907, the hotel is named for the 1853 Gadsden Purchase, in which John Gadsden, the American ambassador to Mexico, negotiated the $10 million purchase of 30,000 square miles of Mexico. The deal determined the line of 1,945 miles that is the present-day border
Over the course of June and July, 2016, Beacon Press published my four-part series on Postcommodity’s “Repellent Fence,” the largest binational land art installation in history. Follow the link above to read “Part One” and continue through the rest of the installments by following the successive links at the end of each.
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Poet Bernadette Mayer’s audiovisual installation Memory, on display now through April 27 at Chicago’s Poetry Foundation, has not been shown in full since its debut in 1971. The concept is simple: Mayer took a roll of slide film every day for a month and then, reviewing those images as projections, spoke into a tape recorder, reading notes made throughout those days and extemporaneously ruminating, reminiscing.
The resulting show amounts to an imposing grid of 1,116 color photographs, laid out in chronological order but arranged to intersect “in chance ways, as homage to John Cage and Morton Feldman,” according to the artist. The images are accompanied by an overwhelming marathon of more than six hours of audio: tape recordings of Mayer rambling quietly, made available on an iPad and accompanying headphones for this particular exhibition.
Viewed from a distance, most of the photographs appear dark and murky, and the audio recordings are themselves dark and murky. The images are mundane and occasionally intimate. They are little more than everyday photographs of Mayer and her friends in diners, taking road trips in upstate New York, boating, sleeping, smoking. There are photographs of trees and rooftops, bodies naked and clothed, window frames and light fixtures. Sometimes Mayer turns the camera on herself.
While there is no doubt that Mayer’s photos display an artist’s innate awareness of color and composition, the overall effect is ordinary. The audio is ruminative and hushed, mostly poorly recorded and nearly obscured for that fact.
The result is surprisingly poignant and entrancing.
Much of her narrative is mundane but poetic. Several hours into the marathon mumbling, one can hear Mayer say: “It’s impossible to put things exactly as they happened and in their real order, one-by-one, but something happened that day in the middle of seeing some people and talking about some people.”
The effect is beyond voyeurism, beyond intimacy. Memory simulates the murky and overwhelming act of remembering. It is about more than just the memories themselves. It is about the context of the remembering. “There’s a truck going by again,” Mayer says as we hear a truck pass outside her apartment. Since Mayer does not change her tone of voice when switching from “remembering” to commenting on the truck, one is left with the sense that one has just witnessed some remarkable synchronicity.
And at one point, while Mayer slips into a litany of names of people discussed with friends on a particular afternoon, listing name after name, a man can be heard out on the street below, repeatedly calling for his friend: “Hey, Ron!” This incidental addition to the list of names has a strangely stirring effect: the context of remembering interacts directly with the remembering itself.
“I’d like to make a schedule of light, on paper, with words. Am I crazy? Why don’t I want to fuck? … Fucking everybody. Putting together the past, so much information … Isn’t it the same thing with numbers? With mathematics?”
The narration moves between oblique stream-of-consciousness and very concrete, unremarkable reminiscence. “I had a nice coffee. Ed had a Coke and we shared a grilled cheese. Or maybe I ate the cheese sandwich and Ed had a piece of pie.” The understated subject matter, with regard to both the photographs and the narrative, allows for the spotlight to fall on the telling itself, and not what is being told.
Perhaps what is most remarkable about Memory is how prescient it appears to be today in its very mundaneness. Standing and looking at photograph after photograph of skinny, shirtless, long-haired young men smoking and playing guitar, saturated images of country roads and friends gathered intimately, one cannot help but to feel that one is viewing an Instagram prototype.
40 years later, we find ourselves inundated with these kinds of artfully cast but ordinary images and unfiltered reflections. But to see it all collected in the context of memory, of one private history, and to spend time entering into this simulated remembering process, one cannot help but to wonder: does that modern inundation cheapen the experience of the mundane? Does our own compulsion to document the mundane find itself accidentally mocked in this work? How will all our daily documentation appear in 45 years and what effect will that compulsion ultimately have on memory itself, if any at all?
Or perhaps there is an implicit poetry in our contemporary tendency to bask in these images, to constellate them into grids or scroll through them by the hour. “Connections … connections … Where do the pictures come in?” Mayer asks while scrolling through her own slides.
Collapsing Memory, Migration W.G. Sebald’s work only flirts, though deeply, with the explicitly political. Can a flirtation have depth? Does Sebald’s work in fact provide evidence that yes, it can? His work deals with memory and it deals with migration. It is incidental, to an extent, that the subject of migration in Sebald’s work has to do with war. Sebald was born in Bavaria, sixteen months before the end of World War II. His father was in the German defense force. Sebald grew up under the influence of unprocessed memories, as we all do, and his work deals with the implications of those memories. His work deals with the effects of displacement and migration on those memories. And so his work deals with war. But in equal measure, and significantly so, his work deals with the uncanny. Although never explicitly, memory and migration both collapse under the uncanny, again and again, throughout his writing. Both figurative and literal displacement, both figurative and literal rambling, are highlighted just as they are diminished, by the sublime connectedness of experience. Disorientation stands for disorientation, but it also stands for a collapsing of experience(s) across distances, across borders, and across time (as memory). From deep in the twilight of 2015, the implications of Sebald’s writing emerge as vividly as they may ever have, so far. Can one be deep in a twilight? Can implications be vivid? This is a photograph that I took on the morning of December 14, 2015, fourteen years to the day after Sebald’s sudden death. It has no explicit connection to his life or work, nor to any of the above text. Originally written for Çadaver Journal FB page, December 2015.
I added my body to the numbers assembled for a lattice of causes, all made of the same general material. From Federal Plaza, up Michigan Avenue, Dearborn to Clark, bodies marching, bodies chanting, bodies laying down, bodies marching.
The Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political Repression is the organizing force. The police are profoundly present but without meddling.
A mustached, middle aged white man in a Chicago Bears hat raises his voice from the curb: “Three-hundred thousand white men died to free to the slaves! How come I never hear a thank you for that? Huh? Ignorant fucks.”
He is targeting, in particular, a group of young black men entoning their concerns in verse through a small public address system that they carry along.
A few angrily engage this angry man, more yelling, the police observe.
Hands on shoulders, the man is left aside, spit in his mustache. He is certain he is right and he shouts about his right to share his knowledge and his certainty of his rightness. He is as certain that he is right as those marching, chanting, laying down, marching. And he shouts that if those in the street have the right, he has his right also, right there on the curb.
No one is satisfied. Those assembled under the banner of the Chicago Alliance Against Racist and Political repression are dissatisfied because the Chicago Police Department still operates a torture facility on Chicago’s West Side that is in violation of the United Nations’ Convention Against Torture. The man in the Bears hat is dissatisfied because no one at the demonstration thanked him for freeing the slaves.
The next day, the local news airs a report on the demonstration. They run archival footage of violent clashes between police and protesters.
Originally written for Çadaver Journal FB page, December 2015.
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This year, Dunbar-Ortiz has toured the U.S. in support of An Indigenous Peoples' History and her stops have intertwined with developments tied to Indigenous rights in America.
Follow this link to read my Q&A with historian and activist Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, published by Huffington Post Books via The GroundTruth Project.
“In the late morning of June 26th, 1975, two young FBI agents named Jack Coler and Robert Williams entered the property of Lakota Sioux elders Harry and Cecelia Jumping Bull while ostensibly investigating the theft of a pair of cowboy boots, and engaged in a firefight with several native activists who were camped there. Those two FBI agents and a young Indian named Joe Stuntz would be dead by mid-afternoon, slain in the South Dakota sun. Leonard Peltier, one of the activists camped at Jumping Bull that day, is currently serving back-to-back life sentences for the deaths of Koehler and Williams. No investigation into the death of Stuntz was ever undertaken.”
Click the above image to read “Blood in the Hills: Leonard Peltier and the Pine Ridge Reservation Shootings 40 Years Later” on The End of Being
I was once hired to clean out an old house in Chicago's Lakeview neighborhood. The neighborhood is made up mostly of young professionals, recent college graduates, and young, white, upper-class families. Many of the buildings are new; there are new condos and single family homes, and most of the neighborhood's businesses were established no more than fifteen or twenty years ago.
Entering the house, on the 1400 West block of George Street, was nothing like stepping back in time, but it could be said that it was like stepping out of one time and into time itself, if time itself is the tenuous relationship between decay and preservation. The house, I soon learned, was built in the late 1800s and had been in the same family since. The owner was an old man who had made the clean-out call at the behest of his adult children, many or all of whom were present at the time, mostly standing outside in the mid-afternoon rain, drinking coffee out of paper to-go cups. The house had been purchased by this old man's grandparents and, from what I gathered, he had grown up there. It was unclear to me whether or not anyone had been living in the house recently, but if anyone had, it was not under ideal circumstances.
Most soft items in the house -- anything involving fabric or upholstery, curtains and couches -- were rotten. The air smelled of mold and rot and damp dusts. The electrical system was in decay and sections of the wallpaper and ceiling, paint and wood, were falling away from the shadowed existence of the standing world, giving in to the impulse of most solids to become at least partially air. The air hung heavy with that rot, but the house was full of beautiful old furniture, mid-century modern dressers and lamps, tables and chairs, resisting decay in the dark, cellar-like conditions.
The most immediately arresting among the items in the front room was a vivid, framed photograph of Canova's Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss, probably 36" by 24", which hung over a couch that had been infested with mice. I pointed to it and commented that it had always been one of my favorite pieces of art. (1) A woman -- one of the old man's daughters, I assumed -- told me that it was as good as mine and I should feel free to take it. I started on some other items first and after making a few runs to the truck, I again commented on the piece while passing through the room. This time the old man told me, with apparent irritation, that I could not have it: "No, that's not going" was all he said.
In the basement, unsurprisingly, was more rot, but it was also made of and contained items made of material that could not rot, half dirt floor and stone. Turn-of-the-century tools and small farming equipment gave up the memory of this house as something that stretched back to when Chicago stood on prairie. In 1895, 1400 W. George St. was not a two hour drive from fields and hawks and horizon. It would have stood on the edge of celery farms, Lakeview having only been annexed to the city of Chicago six years earlier.
People find it difficult to let go of things, even after and perhaps especially after they have made the call to have those things carried off and, in many cases, by the time the clean-out is over, the only things they have held onto were held in a moment of weakness, out of a lack of resolve or inability to let go of the past. So I climbed the basement stairs and passed back into the front room to regard Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss and to ask, again, if perhaps the framed image was coming with me.
I squinted to manage the mild vertigo that came down, that threatened to become much more than mild vertigo, as I looked at the oversized, vivid, framed photographic print of Michelangelo's Pietà hanging above the rotting couch. I was again told that the piece would not be coming with me. I shuffled out of the room and up the stairs to pick through some other items, to remove some other layers of decay, to assess time's rendering of physical objects.
For the remainder of my work day I felt unsteady, uncertain of myself and my surroundings, uncertain of my perceptions. I was as certain that I had seen Cupid and Psyche as I was now certain I was seeing Jesus and Mary, so I had to proceed gingerly, I figured, while handling a kitchen chair or an armoire, although my trepidation was not as lucid or intellectualized as that.
Then I saw a road in evening down which I was driving, between one and ten years earlier. The memory was a sensation as much as it was a memory. The car turned around; I am or am not driving. I am just outside of Bloomington, Indiana, or in rural England or Scotland, or Maine or Connecticut. I am or am not driving but I am certainly in the front seat and it is evening. Back in Chicago, my heart hurt because I wanted the beautiful, giant Psyche Revived by Cupid's Kiss but I could not have it for at least two reasons. As a consolation, taking the Pietà would be decent, but by then I had been told two or three times that I could not have that.
Upstairs from the impossibly young Madonna (2) and her dead son, the old man and one of his adult sons instructed me to remove a China cabinet from the corner, and as I lifted and pulled it out of its place, the son exclaimed and crouched down. There was a large cigar box full of photographs and letters that had been under this piece of furniture for decades. The old man seemed immediately disturbed, almost fearful; he began babbling, walking away from the site of this archaeo-familial discover and asking me irritated questions: "So, are you going to take this table or what?"
The son looked up and said, "Dad, look. Look at all this. This is you," holding up a photograph of a ten year old boy from probably 75 years earlier. The father seemed unable to process the discovery, or to reveal any signs of processing the discovery, and simply barked, "Yeah, that's good stuff, don't throw that away" as he walked agitated circles around the room. The son explained to me that until that moment, the family had no pictures of anyone from "this side of the family", whatever side it was.
As I moved the cabinet to the stairs, I discovered two animal horns, of two different sizes but seemingly originating from the same animal, fastened to each other by a strange sort of pinion, the entire little sculpture coated with a thick, terrifically greasy, black grime. I asked the men if there was any sort of significance to it and they both shrugged it off; the son said it was filthy and did not strike him as anything of importance. I took it.
(1) I have always loved Canova's sculpture for the very personal reason that Psyche's body, her bare hip and thighs, even the slope from her neck to her breasts, reminds me of the body of a woman who I loved for many years.
(2) Michelangelo told his biographer that the reason he sculpted the Virgin Mary to look like a woman much younger than could have possibly mothered a 33-year-old man was that "chaste women stay fresh much more than those who are not chaste.”
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“I shuffled to the far end of the shrine to regard two large incendiary bombs which hang near the Virgin. I knew what I was looking for but I cannot help but to wonder how many pilgrims miss the detail of these weapons, passing through casually or piously or in the hazy bustle of a day of sightseeing, eyes following the lines of Goya’s cupola, entranced by the grandeur. These bombs which were dropped on the cathedral during the Spanish Civil War — but did not detonate — are hung in celebration of this alleged miracle, allegedly enacted by the Virgin herself.”
Click above image to read “A Monument to its Own Passing” on The End of Being.
The United States was not founded by good men. It was built on land unjustly descended upon and wrested from its inhabitants through a systematic white-supremacist settler-colonialist takeover which involved, at its most mild, campaigns of forcible relocation. But at its worst, and predominantly, the founding of the U.S. was an act of ethnic cleansing. No evidence is lacking to support the fact that the indigenous peoples of what is now the U.S. were the targets of intentional obliteration. The alleged "great men" who founded this country are on record calling for the extermination of those peoples via the slaughter of women, children and men alike. The settlers, the exterminators, did not simply move a few people. They destroyed an entire universe of nations, ancestral memories, dreams, and ideologies.
In only one example, Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz tells us that "U.S. occupation and settlement exterminated more than one hundred thousand California Native people in twenty-five years, reducing the population to thirty thousand by 1870 -- quite possibly the most extreme demographic disaster of all time". This is one incident in centuries of genocide. The total number of indigenous deaths may be one thousand times those counted in that incident. But even that number indicates far less than the real loss.
Manifest Destiny is not something in the distant history of the United States; it persists today as a foundational mythology, fundamental to the identity of the U.S. The U.S. military today uses the phrase "Indian Country" as an official term indicating enemy territory, whether in Saudi Arabia, Iraq, etc. There has never been anything close to an official recognition of the truth of the origins of the U.S.
You, reading this, have the right to be happy, to find joy in the world, love and be loved. You were not among the exterminators. But we should read real histories (like those written by Dunbar-Ortiz). Speak truth to power. Never buy into deluded fantasies of righteous origin. You are standing on ruins. You are welcome to use the space below to share relevant resources and to exchange ideas. Happy Thanksgiving.
"Shot by the Band" for Impose Magazine, documenting travels and performances throughout France, Italy, the Czech Republic, Serbia, and Croatia. All text and photos by M. Trecka. Respect due to Roland Barthes.
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On the night of December 8th, 2012, while sleeping in a dank room at a decaying resort in a small vacation town on the southeast coast of England, I dreamed the kind of intoxicating, deep dream that can leave one altered for days and weeks following. In this particular dream, I found myself in a profoundly distant future — perhaps even as far ahead in time as the year 5151 — walking among stalls in a bazar.
Whereas in contemporary Western society, the Abrahamic religions have a hold on our conception of time and the language of day-to-day life (for example, the calendar classification of “A.D.”, or the common exclamation of “Jesus Christ!”), the day-to-day life of the year in which I found myself proceeded from a religious foundation predicated on an already-occurred return of Isis.
So while our very concept of time is based on the myth that Jesus Christ has come and gone and that this occurrence essentially reset time, in this dream, three thousand years ahead in time, life was going on after a return of Isis in an already distant past. In place of the Judeo-Christian sentiment that underlies so much of Western society was the implication of a Cult of Isis, an Isisism.
I walked around, bearing witness to dense collections of popular devotional items offered at stalls: graven images of Isis on plates and posters, as statuettes, not unlike the representations of Our Lady of Guadalupe that one sees at a Mexican market.
There were, as well, striking images of some other mysterious figure, a sort of combination of the Elephant Man, Jo Jo the Dog-faced Boy, and a horned Beelzebub. Tapestries hung, many for sale, that featured this man, imaged in black and white, in partial profile, dressed in a suit and wearing an armband with the number “1515” on it. I can remember the image so very clearly.
Haunted as I was by these particulars, it was the peculiar sense of undeniable difference that struck with the greatest force. The difference was undeniable and profound, but the difference was not garish or large. The particulars were consistent, convincing, and twisted only by degrees from what I know reality to be in my waking life, resulting in an absolute sense of the uncanny. I have often felt, while traveling, that the most stirring experiences of foreignness come in the most familiar forms. Just the other side of familiar is where the strangest sensations reside.
(In another part of the bazar I was made privy to a product called Roma soda; consistent, perhaps, with a long tradition of branding products with appropriated images and names of things and ideas and groups of people deemed exotic.)
Ever since having this dream, I have been attuned to an impressive flow of synchronicities involving Isis, and even of her horned, cynocephalous consort. Only a month or so later, a friend showed me a topographical map of a particular location in rural Canada where the hills form a remarkably striking image of a sort of “native” looking woman. Indeed, the first impression I had when looking at it was that she resembled, rather impressively I thought, Isis. Upon scanning the surrounding environs, I discovered that a nearby cluster of hills resemble Isis’ consort from my dream, about as much as anything I had ever seen or have ever seen since, in waking life.
Short of a year after having this dream, I arrived in Hudson, New York, and went directly to the venue, a converted factory building just near the river for which the city is named. It was here that I was engaged for the evening, to do my work of arranging instruments in a space and performing in front of people. In this instance, the spectacle was to take place in a particularly beautiful space, but what was more striking than the beauty was the eerie sense of familiarity. I had been to Hudson before, on at least two occasions that I can remember, and so of course, there was that to consider. Yet my arrival this time gave up virtually no familiarity that was obviously associated with those previous visits, received as I was, this time, by acquaintances I had made since I was last there. There was a particular interest in Hudson among the group as Beth is able to trace considerable family history to the town.
I was soon enough moved to take a short walk alone in a field just east of the venue. Traveling in a large group, as I was, demands such activities. The grasses, knee-high, moved as though inhabited, seemed to and possibly did conceal inhabitants, as I moved through. Sun still golden in that particularly autumnal character, swimming its way through structures of use now forgotten or reconsidered.
When I returned from my walk, I was introduced to the director of the venue, Melissa, a colorful, warm and engaging woman who, I noted immediately, wore a gold charm in the image of Isis on a delicate gold chain around her neck. I have no interest in claiming that, for example, in this instance, there is any sort of magical connection between my dream and this woman’s Isis necklace. Of course, lack of interest in making this claim does little to negate my belief that such connections are valid in some way or another. Either that night or the following afternoon we would go on to talk about Isis — her cat is named Isis, she feels a strong connection to the image of Isis, and so on.
In the midst of the act of arranging ourselves in the space, evening light streaming through high factory windows, a friendly looking dog entered the room, ahead of her two owners, skeltered through the space, and exited the other end of the room. Beth, Ben, and I commented pleasantly to each other about the dog, and I smiled at the humans trailing it. When we finished our work, I wandered into the next room and found the dog and its owners, sitting on the floor. The dog greeted me in a fashion consistent with its apparent demeanor and, asking about its name, I discovered that the dog was called Weezie. Beth’s maternal grandmother was, affectionately, named Weezie.
That first night in Hudson, after the performance, a number of people convened at the Half Moon Saloon. Months later I would re-read Lorca’s Media Luna and think of this night.
La luna va por el agua.
¡Cómo está el cielo tranquilo!
Va segando lentamente
el temblor viejo del río
mientras que una rana joven
la toma por espejito.
There were no frogs that night at the Half Moon, that I know of, but perhaps things were mistaken for little mirrors.
The Half Moon had relatively recently come under new ownership after passing through a two-year limbo phase. The previous owner, Fred Martin, had committed suicide in the saloon, allegedly behind the bar. Local mythology pointed toward gambling debts of a magnitude that anything less than an exit could not solve.
Beth’s family on her father’s side is from Hudson. Our second night there, we went in search of stories relating to those people, the Dolans. As the Half Moon is closed on Mondays, we were directed to the Iron Horse Bar where, Melissa advised us, we were not to play the jukebox if Jeopardy was on the television.
When we entered the Iron Horse, we were observed, though not necessarily greeted, by two men, one perhaps in his seventies, the other certainly in his eighties; the latter sitting behind the bar, the former, at it, both with an air of matter-of-fact melancholy. The television was not playing Jeopardy but Wheel of Fortune, and in addition, served to provide a significant portion of the illuminating light in the room. I asked if the light above the pool table could be turned on so that I might shoot pool and the old man behind the bar nodded, but made no move to assist me. The jukebox was also off. Beth ordered me a beer — a seven-ounce bottle of Budweiser for one dollar — and herself a whiskey and joined me at the pool table although before long, she found herself seated at the bar. Jeopardy came on the television.
"I remember a Fingers Dolan …” Frank Martino would cough a little behind the bar and drone memories of various Dolans in response to Beth’s questions, occasionally tipping his head forward and down and ceasing to talk, as though he had been suddenly taken under by sleep. Before long, the man would recover, lift his head and one hand, slightly, and continue. It seemed as though the act of remembering had to be compartmentalized, that a certain amount of energy needed to be diverted to the process of recalling memories — images and opinions — in order that it would be possible at all to respond. That is to say not that Frank seemed to be concentrating, but that strategic remembering was an action which could only be undertaken at the exclusion of other actions. And all of this only during commercial breaks. Fred, the patron, was also happy to entertain such memory exercises, as far as one might conflate happiness with willingness or even eagerness.
It became apparent that Frank Martino, in addition to fronting a band in the 1940s called Frankie and His Golden Notes, had also been acquainted with the actor Paul Newman. Framed photographs on the wall attested to both of these details, one featuring Frank in the improbable posture of sitting on the back of a bucking horse in the street. Whether time had worn this photograph or time had rendered antique the technology of the particular camera that captured that moment, something lent the image a peculiarly gauzy quality, somehow both more than and less than faded. Frank’s hypnogogic storytelling continued with the subject of Paul Newman, who received a notably tender touch. Though muted by the process, Frank was in some way elated to explain that Newman was very much like a normal person, that to sit next to him at the bar and strike up a conversation, one would not necessarily take him for a movie star, that he always seemed to be a normal person, just like you or me, though, at Beth’s goading, Frank was quick to admit that Newman’s striking features and charisma were exceptional; if he looked you in the eye, you did not want to break his gaze. Newman had made the film Nobody’s Fool in the town and partially in the tavern itself, in the early 1990s. That film also features a twenty-something Philip Seymour Hoffman, who was born 250 miles west in Fairport, NY and who died twenty years later, 150 miles south in Manhattan.
Frank Martino owned, and had been operating, the Iron Horse since his father died behind the bar 42 years earlier.
We left after a few hours and a few 7 oz. Budweiser bottles, to drive 20 miles south, where we slept in a double-wide trailer on a horse ranch. Frank Martino died twelve days later.
The following evening, eleven days before Frank’s death, I arrived in Northampton, Massachusetts, and went directly to the Iron Horse Music Hall, where I was engaged to do my work. After what could be described as an evening particularly devoid of engagement, I was directed to Ye Old Watering Hole and Beer Can Museum, before moving on to the home of the couple who would host us for the evening. In between the Watering Hole and the couple’s home, a portion of the group and myself were brought across the street to peer through the glass panes of the overhead rolling doors at Harold’s Garage.
This business, apparently a wrecking service, housed and perhaps utilized vintage tow trucks — monstrous and anachronistic or, at least, this is the treatment that my memory has given them. The trucks seemed out of time and place; more than the sort of novelty that the “Beer Can Museum” had offered, but not quite as absurd as the photograph of Frank Martino on the bucking horse. The absurdity delivered by that evening came still a bit later, after settling into the home of our gracious hosts, our large group spreading out within the relatively tight confines of this New England home. We were, all of us, shown where the fruit and cereal was kept so that we might help ourselves in the morning; we were shown to the tiny bathroom and shower, and offered homemade cider of a sort of Bretagne style, but made by one of our gracious hosts.
In the kitchen, I fell into conversation with one of my traveling companions in what felt like truly one of the very few calm moments in a day of nearly constant travel and cycles of adaptation and readaptation. Soon, our host had made his way into the kitchen and collapsed to the floor. I lifted his limp body, weighing certainly a third more than mine, and put him in his bed. He sat up and asked what had happened. His partner, our other host, explained to him that he had imbibed Ketamine. He was incredulous: “Are you serious? That’s crazy.” He then attempted to stand up and fell back down. For one straddling the event horizon of a “K-hole”, unremitting subjectivity and cycles of memory loss, adaptation and readaptation, lead to incredulity. Experiencing the effects of Ketamine at this stage effect an inability to remember imbibing the ketamine. For those spontaneously tending to someone in a K-hole, this situation can effect a kind of parallel psychedelic state. This is all simply to say that our host went in and out of consciousness every 60 or 90 seconds for the next hour-and-a-half, asking the same question every time, trying — and failing — to stand every time, and very much requiring tending. In the morning, he would be happy to talk about the experience at great length, stating over and over that he had “never seen anything like it” in all of his experiences with Ketamine. I wondered what he meant, as I carried a persistent sense that he was the only one who had not observed the experience.
Four days later, the fuel pump on my vehicle went out on the highway near Vernon Rockville, Connecticut. Ben, Beth and I nearly came to blows with a man who was part of a group of people arguing with a waitress at a Japanese restaurant.
On July 2nd, 2012, I hurried across badlands, clay slopes, and scoria, to reach a particular place by sundown, where I was determined to camp for the night. I reached my destination just as the sun, muted and somehow lunar, bowed towards a Martian landscape, although by the time I was making camp, the clay and scoria and rattlesnakes had all been overtaken by a dense, hot, swelling dark. A few hours later, and for hours, just after dawn, I slept only very fitfully, a tormented kind of sleep through which anxiety fought to bring me to vigilance: I could hear, across the hills, a raging rain. Sheets of water profoundly falling miles to the earth, echoing over slopes like static — I was certain that it was only a matter of minutes before our camp was awash.
When I finally roused myself enough to crouch and exit the tent to survey how quickly the rainstorm was approaching, I found only clear skies, the color of honey and pomegranates, hills of sand colored grasses and clay. The sound that had been torturing me was only a breath-like breeze, consistent, and gently rushing through every cottonwood leaf within earshot. Two wild horses trotted through my camp.
I collaborated with the rest of the band Dark Dark Dark to score the film Flood Tide. This is the trailer for the film, which was released in November 2014. More information at floodtidefilm.com.
