A history of the arbitrary line that runs West from El Paso to the Pacific Ocean starts with the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo. This declaration, like the NorteAmerican War with Mexico itself, was driven by the delusional project of "manifest destiny". Delusional fatalism is structural. Turn to Deleuze & Guattari. On the Line will be a crucial conceptual touchstone. Mapping resistance need not manifest itself in the structure of binary opposition if one explores the borderlands as a contact zone; a zone of contestation where difference is not something to be erased and resolved even if into dialectical synthesis. Difference is to be engaged, not endured, not tolerated. The myth of tolerance is one of the many problems troubling neo-liberalism's humanitarian impulse. Form for a multi-pronged project cannot, in searching multiplicities, necessarily be articulated in advance but rather, most likely, will be something discovered. What was walking the earth before learning to read stars? (November 13, 2017)

Perhaps 300 years seems like a very long time. Certainly for objects that survive the vagaries of human migrations and neglect or pure obsolescence (as if such a thing is ever pure). Objects no longer of use become works of art, or so Heidegger claims. Is uselessness at the very center of art and its purpose? Perhaps use as a term needs an expanded definition. Use need not be instrumentalizing. An object for contemplation has this use: that of contemplation. Contemplation is useful. Simone Weil wrote that "without room for reflection between the impulse and the act, neither is there room for justice." Her essay on Force still demands our attention. (November 10, 2017)

Cannot escape the colonial escapades of Spain. Missions. Empty lots. The Mission Trailsouth of El Paso is an "authentic travel experience". And without irony runs parallel to the Rio Grande (aka the border between Mexico and Texas) and its cotton fields and Border Patrol stations. Crossing is at the center of this new film project. All kinds, especially those associated with lines and signs. And churches. Catholic churches and their doctrine of suffering can be converted from heaven-bound fatalism to an earth-bound clarion call for human rights. Liberation Theology, if revived today, could clarify itself as a resistance to capitalism and its abuses within the language of living the life of Christ. Time to deal with faith and politics in the 21st Century. (November 7, 2017)

It is the light in Marfa. That is what this town in the Big Bend of the Rio Grande is known for. Well it could just as well be the Southern Pacific Rail at night. It is both the proximity of that train and the nature of that sound that together makes one feel in this place so damn nostaligic. One could imagine just how a life before computers and cell phones might have felt, well perhaps might have been experienced. Like in a blackout. How I wish for one of those. How I wish for that over guns and insanity which together hit another rural Texas town yesterday. (November 6, 2017)

Entering Texas with the greeting: drive friendly -- the Texas way. Perhaps driving diagonally across three lanes of traffic at 90mph in a one ton truck is that way? Hard not to feel you're not in on the joke. 93.3 FM starts out promising in Houston and another station with the same call letters veers off into platitudes by the time one rolls into Austin. Radio is a perfect gauge of culture when signals cross. When breakpoint disappears in the contamination of Can I Kick It? which itself samples Lou Reed. Radio. Radio or cows. Shall we try other Texas ways? Cows have learned this: Gather together under the shade of a tree. Rise when movement or sound is perceived. Stare directly at its souce. Disperse slowly. (November 5, 2017)

New Orleans. Ninth Ward. How many years now since Katrina? Rows of homes still boarded up. Men walking with a clothes washer in a shopping cart. Two men in a kitchen with no way to make hot food. Go to Gene's, one of them says looking back to his buddy as if to make sure my leaving will be ok. The other guy nods and gives the address. A forsaken resilience here. These men stand on the edges of a swamp against inevitable and ongoing natural destruction and human neglect. What coastal town will be the last standing? Mobile? Biloxi? Houston? Signs for real estate speculation in the Bayou fall away amidst the overgrowth of all that will be left to live here in Atchafalaya. There are no plans for evacuation. (November 4, 2017)

Crossing the state line that separates North from South Carolina, one finds oneself "South of the Border". This roadside sideshow is a loathsome curiosity. To be fair, it is not alone in its audacity. There is Alabama. Sweet Home it says when crossing the Chatahoochee River from Georgia. Alabama. Nearly every off-ramp is a major site of the Civil Rights Movement: Birmingham, Montgomery, Selma. Perhaps this is the state where one might take the temperature of the United States. Rural. White and Black Men (on road crews together). Lesbians. Churches. College Football. Harleys. Hank Williams. Perhaps this country's future resides in Alabama. Its past certainly does. (November 2, 2017)

Halloween in Savannah. Gothic dripping Spanish moss. Yes. All of that. But it is watching Romero's Night of the Living Dead that strikes most deeply. Duane Jones. Here is the African-American actor who leads a hapless group of terrified white people hiding from the zombies. A role not "intended" for a black man makes the film an extraordinary example of both color-blind casting and writing. It is also the intelligence of this man, his unapologetic certainty. So many turns in the story when the dynamics could have festered in cliche racist fear-driven portrayals: a white woman seduction, a master/slave exchange between men, etc. Though there is the paranoid husband who can't persuade anyone to stay in the basement with his wife and child, it is more of a territorial argument between two men not between a black and a white man. But then, the unfortunate ending with police and dogs (sans firehoses) and the killing of the black man (mistaken as a zombie). More images of racism come to mind linking media coverage to domestic facts. In LA92 the overhead shot of Rodney King being beaten is repeated (this time from a news helicopter) when black men pull a white man from his truck to beat him up. Only this time the image is accompanied by a newscaster's appalled declaration of shock. America has an intractable double standard when it comes to race. And race masks class. Always. (November 1, 2017)

The weather changes from late summer to winter overnight. Thoughts on gentrification and its manifestation in the old tabacco warehouses of Durham, North Carolina. A simple question: what is it one fears in abandoned stretches of America? Among the brick facade remains of manufacturing has been built the economic engines of consumption and real estate speculation. In The Book Lady of Savannah, a spine opens to Eugene Debs' Sound Socialist Tactics, a 1913 essay. Force. Again, force. Revolutionary and reactionary fissures in Socialism. How to contend with property rights that by any measure should be "held in contempt".