born: Pasadena, CA, USA
resides: Cambridge, MA, USA
travel and residences: Southeast Asia [primarily Indonesia], Japan [six years], Scotland, London, Berlin, Warsaw
education:
MFA Graphic Design, Massachusetts College of Art, Boston, MA, USA
MA Malay-Indonesian Language+Literature, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
AB English, UC Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, USA
employment:
Assistant Professor, Montserrat College of Art, Beverly, MA, USA
Born in Pasadena, grew up in Eagle Rock [an old suburb in Los Angeles]; moved away to San Jose and then Berkeley when I could. Have lived six years in Tokyo, 14 years in and around Cambridge, months in Indonesia and London; other travel has taken me elsewhere in Asia, and to Scotland, Berlin, Warsaw and here and there in America. Carry two passports.
Stammering "visual practitioner." Interest in the look, feel and multifarious uses of words and/with images has accompanied me through degrees in literature, the years in Tokyo writing annual reports and editing securities research, editorial and design practice, a degree in design and, eventually and by accident, teaching. The walk continues. The last year or so has mostly been occupied by research and writing on telegraphic codes and message practice, 1870-1945; other engagements include garden and earthwork, asphalt [as material and metaphor], and emblems. Regret not being wired for engineering; write a kind of verse for consolation.
Weak rootedness -- a drifting tendency I detect with alarm incipient in my older son -- is apparently my condition.
Not travel I think but language -- an unwarranted reliance on its magic, belief that an answer lies always at hand and that the right word can and must right all wrong -- has set me afloat, an untethered Laputan cloud that casts no shadow and obtains no purchase nor traction on the firmament below. No place, no privileged place, no difference that remains different, inside or outside.
Take this passage, from Roland Barthes his Criticism and Truth [1966/1987], regarding psychoanalytic man --
his topology is not that of the inside and the outside, even less that of the top and the bottom, but rather that of a moving obverse and reverse whose language as a matter of fact never stops playing different roles and turning surfaces around something which, from beginning to end, does not actually exist.-- I imagine that obverse/reverse movement as a medal on legs, ambulating slowly, clumsily down the road.