Month: December 2016

“The Unfree Secret of the Heart,” oils on 30 x 60 cm stretched canvas (web store).

With thanks to Eva Kästel for sending me to David Bowie’s painting “Heart’s Filthy Lesson” that, along with KN and Leonard Cohen’s “Anthem” (“the dove is never free”) inspired this painting.

Now this, always with more thanks to the muses than can be expressed.

“New Years Resolutions”

More birds, fewer stones.
Less words, more poems.
More lovers, fewer drones.

One good line every day.
Accept Trump isn’t going away.
Make art, get out of the way.

No liars or cheats or drunks.
Only necessary funks.
More sluts, fewer monks.

All of this I wish for me.
And for you, what would you be?
I’ll help and cheer you along times three.

Three hips for birds.
Three hips for words.
Hip-hooray for your soft lips,
close enough to be blurred.

Oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas (web store).

Oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas (web store).

Oils on 40 x 50 cm stretched canvas (web store).

In the grand tradition of miraculous birth commemorations…

“Leda and the Swan”

W.B. Yeats

A sudden blow: the great wings beating still
Above the staggering girl, her thighs caressed
By the dark webs, her nape caught in his bill,
He holds her helpless breast upon his breast.

How can those terrified vague fingers push
The feathered glory from her loosening thighs?
And how can body, laid in that white rush,
But feel the strange heart beating where it lies?

A shudder in the loins engenders there
The broken wall, the burning roof and tower
And Agamemnon dead.
Being so caught up,
So mastered by the brute blood of the air,
Did she put on his knowledge with his power
Before the indifferent beak could let her drop?

Oils on 60 x 80 cm stretched canvas (web store).

Oils on 60 x 90 cm stretched canvas (web store).

Oils on 60 x 80 cm stretched canvas (web store). 

 

“Wednesday Morning Haiku”

The second installment in my apparent post-election poetry series.

Amerika ist
Kaputt. Deutsch lernen ist gut.
Run—now would be good.

“Six Eyes,” oils on 60 x 80 cm stretched canvas (web store). 

Published today on The Science Creative Quarterly. Brief overview of the basics of information security—encryption, securing endpoints, diversifying communication methods, and why all technological, legal, and political resistance is doomed (for some value of doomed).

Today on The Memory Hole 2 I re-release and curate an archive of polygraph files—documents relating to government lie detection programs that I helped obtain, analyze, and make public as part of my University of Virginia Politics graduate research. Among other things, the documents show the CIA broke the law and lied to Congress about it, polygraphers themselves complained to the U.S. government about how it used polygraphs overseas—and were apparently ignored, and federal security agencies really, really don’t want to have to come out and say that they act like equal opportunity law doesn’t apply to them when they damn well please. And no, you can’t check their numbers to see if bias is a thing. Nothing to see here.

If you like this sort of thing, support my Naked Polygraph Project—a 100% non-terrorist, non-spy, equal opportunity authoritarian-hating art-science-fun project that seeks to prove and raise awareness of flaws in technologies that may be abused to deprive quite a few people of human rights including privacy, movement, and asylum.

“Mind Over Matter,” oils on 100 x 120 cm stretched canvas (web store). Inspired by Jonathan Bachman’s iconic photo of  Ieshia Evans protesting with Black Lives Matter against the Baton Rouge police killing of Alton Sterling. 

 

“Wednesday Morning”

Nov. 9, 2016

I had not hoped you would come to see

How small the world has become to me.

I am Muslim, I am Jew.

Black and blue, me and you.

 

I’m fleeing crime, or the police.

I’m just trying to get a lease.

I want for myself what everyone wants.

Food, shelter, laughter’s call and response.

I want to live without a wall.

It’s a small world, after all.

I want for you to be safe and loved—and to love.

We’re equal below ground—why not above?

Oils on 40 x 40 cm stretched canvas (web store).