The Most Accurate Thing I Have Seen on Canvas

The Most Accurate Thing I Have Seen on Canvas

Paris, June 1937Guernica is hanging at the Spanish Pavilion of the International Exposition on the Champ de Mars. I stood in front of it for two hours today. I have been in enough wars to have personal reference points for what this painting documents.Picasso has not...
The Music That Named the Distance

The Music That Named the Distance

London, October 1982There is a club on Meard Street in Soho that opened this year. The Batcave. I have been three times now, standing in the back where the sound is slightly less total, watching something happen that I recognize from other moments in other centuries:...
The Black Sun: What Authority Becomes

The Black Sun: What Authority Becomes

Various, consolidatedEvery century I have moved through has produced its particular version of the same configuration: a system of authority that begins with a claim to legitimacy, accumulates power on the basis of that claim, and eventually uses the accumulated power...