The Devil's Chair
‘Mom, I am an Animal’
‘Alright, Russell’
I wanted to find friends who were similar to the characters in Crime and Punishment.
You know, when we were growing up, a hundred years ago, there were not that many forms of entertainment. No telephone or Bluetooth, no Twitter or talking robots. We had only recently passed the dinosaurs.
For my brother and I, when we would get bored, something exciting for us would be to go visit this massive rock, about three miles down the county line. They called it the “Devil’s Chair.” I guess they called it that because the shape was so unusual: Sloped on the side of a hill, it looked like a bed an alien would sleep on. You’d think they would have changed the name, considering the risk of the evangelicals going fanatic and blowing it up with dynamite. But as far as I know of, it’s still here.
I guess we were spiritual, somehow, we had it in our DNA. Something about this rock was so serene and energizing and powerful. It just made you want to crawl on top of it and shut up. It took a little …
The Phone Booth at the End of the Beach
‘Let’s go see the petroglyphs!’
Drawing Blue
Hallucinogens reveal the lie of certainty; please don’t try this with students under 18.
“Draw blue,” I said, laying back in a hammock and watching them try, using sticks in the coarse Caribbean sand. You might imagine — as I think I did — that the best approach would be to draw something inherently, enduringly, blue. The sea. A blue jay. A morpho butterfly. Blueberries. As it turned out, this was not the best approach.
The closest renderings were entirely abstract. I have no memory of what those renderings were. If I took pictures at all, those pictures are on film somewhere, in a box of slides, waiting to be sorted. It was that long ago. But I do remember that some of the abstractions managed to feel like blue in a way that the representative drawings in the sand did not.
How do you evoke a color without a color? Do particular colors have a symbolic meaning that can be transmitted without language?
Synesthesia is the interweaving of senses that we consider distinct. We presume …
Trucking Our Way Through the Regulatory Apocalypse
Ford F-150s and Dodge RAMs were shaped not by men, but by chickens
Through the lens of NY photog Lee Friedlander, we see trucks as miniature domestic love affairs: mobile homes, trusted companions, coworkers, carriers of what looks like junk.
Meanwhile, we are denied the use of cheap and super-practical motorized donkeys made by VW, Toyota, Datsun, and Suzuki on the road to the state-mandated nightmare of Elon Musk’s new Cybertruck.
I don’t own a truck. I’ve wanted one, off and on over the years, but the circumstances — financial, familial — have never quite coalesced in the right way to make it happen. The kind of truck that would be ideal for me is a small truck, like an early Ford Ranger or Chevy S-10, but alas I’m not alone in this desire, and supply is limited. These days, in my area of cow-country New York, you need upward of $10,000 for a rusty 4x4 Ranger with well over 100,000 miles on it. The old Tacomas have all been hipsterfied, as have the candy-striped 80s F-150s. It’s not that I love Rangers, which aren’t reliable or powerful or good-looking. It’s that I’m somewhere on the border between lifestyle and utility, and I don’t want a midsize or oversized honker. I drive a rusting early-aughts Mercedes station wagon and I don’t enjoy sitting high over the road. What I want in a truck is a way to bring sheets of plywood home from the …
