St. Kilda, Australia

And then one day that thing which weighed the most
Slips off the neck like a linen scarf and blows down the beach
You are no longer concerned with the shards of shell beneath your feet
The horizon has always been as far and will not come any closer
The sea takes more sand with no intention of giving it back
It was always your choice to stay here (Saint Kilda never existed)
The only one canonized on this hot boardwalk is you.

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Reflections on our age of misrule

Donald Trump’s unceasing media travesty brings to mind studies of societal collapse from Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History [he looked at 26 civilizations] through to Jared Diamond’s Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed and Ronald Wright’s book A Short History of Progress, which Quebec filmmaker Mathieu Roy and I adapted into the theatrical documentary Surviving Progress.  Each of them identify as a primary cause of collapse – Wright calls them “progress traps”  - the disastrous leadership of elites.  They are shown to misgovern through ignorance, self–serving belief systems, and their growing insulation from the interests of the larger society. 

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Kara Walker Show

It was as horrifying as it was life-changing, the lack of any facial feature or details erased from her quasi-cartoonish figures engaging in a chaotic interplay of violent revenge and total domination, confronting the viewer with the stubbornness of slavery’s legacy that had been transmuted into 150 years of racist governmental policy and cultural stereotypes.

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Two Poems

Early evening in Firenze.  The day’s main events have passed. 

Paint spread across canvases, lovers embraced, gelato devoured.

Have the clouds begun to shift into their twilight stance? That distinct Florentine merging of gold, yellow, pink? 

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