Category: Field Notes
-
Field Note 3.1 (a): The Blasted Stage —Kierkegaard’s Clown, Newsom’s Warning, and Trump’s Burning Theatre
We cannot lean on prophecy or conspiracy. We have only history and inference when we measure the depth of Trump’s “vaulting ambition” — and the lengths he’ll go to cheat death, beat the law, rig the system, and make himself immortal. Kierkegaard saw it clearly: “Life can only be understood backwards; but it must be…
-
Field Note 3¾ — The Rainbow Connection: Don’t Believe Everything You Think
We’re steeped in phrases, slogans, narratives, and interpretations — authored by others, many of whom have anything but our best interests at heart, and are all too ready to turn us into croaking frogs, gig us clean, and fry up our meaty legs.
-
Field Note 1.R: The Coup Clux Clown Rides Again
You see, I was in Russia the night Putin took power. It was New Year’s Eve, 1999, when Yeltsin resigned and appointed the former KGB agent as Acting President of the Russian Federation. Putin’s campaign against the free press began almost immediately.
-
Field Note 2.2: Of ICE and Men
In this Field Note, I follow the ghostly echoes of California’s past — from Miwok and Chumash place names to masked raids by modern ICE agents. In a land shaped by snowmelt and migration, we ask: What happens when old names remain, but new dispossessions unfold? The rivers carry more than water. They carry tears.
-
Field Note 2.1: The Wind Has No Papers
Not long after, we found ourselves witness to the tail end of the annual migration of California tortoiseshell butterflies, lifted upslope on Lassen’s invisible updrafts. Many had journeyed from northern Mexico and Baja California — without proper papers, their wings notwithstanding. And yet we do not call them “illegal.”
No Shortcuts to Now 