On preserving Gilberto Guzman’s “Multi-Cultural” mural in Santa Fe, New Mexico

I’ve got an op-ed (written with my father) out in my hometown newspaper The Santa Fe New Mexican today on the necessity of preserving a mural that has a deeply primal hold on my subconscious. Something about it has always felt Jungian, the figures and forms looming large over flashes of my sun-baked southwestern childhood. There are a few photos beyond the jump. Read more about the controversy over its destruction here

One particular figure in the mural imprinted itself deep within my own subconscious, the bull creature on the left.

“When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert …”
Continue reading “On preserving Gilberto Guzman’s “Multi-Cultural” mural in Santa Fe, New Mexico”

The Circle Come Round At Last


“Mankind is not a circle with a single center but an ellipse with two focal points of which facts are one and ideas the other.”—Victor Hugo

Last week I climbed higher than the Sears Tower in a near-fugue state, brought on by a Netflix series. “The Circle” is a surreal distillation of our zeitgeist, one that is eminently satisfying on a limbic level. It offers the uneasy sensation of a deepfake, of a show entirely designed and cast by a neural net trained on all our contemporary neuroses: “We forced an AI with generalized anxiety disorder to view ten billion Instagram interactions and here’s what it made!”

Continue reading “The Circle Come Round At Last”