Caldiero, Carrier, and Bowden: An Unholy Trinity

"Scott has reported from the Far East," Bowden said, "and Alex has reported from Outer Space. Now I'll report from the Mexican/American border."

I've been wondering just what Charles Bowden might have meant when he began his reading after having heard Alex Caldiero and Scott Carrier last Friday at UVSC.

There's a way that all three readers/performers reported from outer space. They dislocated us. They displaced our minds. They surprised and shocked and delighted and concerned and generally worked over our accepted ideas till we were less sure of ourselves and more sure of what needed to be done in Burma and Juarez and the USA.

Carrier and Bowden had that effect through what they taught us about their respective catastrophes (and by means of their very different but equally remarkable voices). Caldiero disconcerted and regaled our minds and emotions by working on the border of the articulate and the inarticulate, that place where sounds become words and words slip back into sound. Sicilian, Spanish, and English alternated with the vibrations of a Jewsharp, with the grunts and raspings, chants and sibilant whispers that only Alex can conjure.

Incantations, Ken Sanders claimed, after Vegor pointed out that Alex's bag of tricks were straight out of Aleister Crowley's book of magick.

For 90 minutes, Utah Valley State College was the center of the universe.

More thoughts on photos and meaning

Over the weekend I've been thinking more about photos, those historical/artistic records we figure will outlast us but that, in the most important sense, are as brief as our faces (John Berger).

The examples I gave of knowledge I had of the people in the 1966 photo of young men and airplanes at Lake Powell, knowledge that supposedly would disappear when I do, weren't as good as they might have been. I listed names and professions and what became of some of us after the photo was taken.

Better examples might have been taken from the thinking I've been doing while trying to read the photo for some writing I'm doing.

I was in Boise, for instance, following traces left by my brother John before he died of AIDS in 1992, when I stepped right into Larry Echohawk's campaign for Governor. The contrast between his extremely public and successful life and John's death in a cheap apartment across the street from the State Capitol was painful. Those thoughts and memories create an aura (see Walter Benjamin) that no one besides me can experience.

The future Mayor of Farmington is interesting to me because of his role in the 1974 demonstrations by Navajos in Farmington after three Navajo men were tortured and killed by Farmington High School students. The Mayor, a kind and gentle and generous man, excoriated the Federal Civil Rights Commission's "Farmington Report" as the product of a socialist government and claimed there was no racism to speak of in our red-neck, oil-boom town.

I look into the faces of the five generous men who have brought us here in their airplanes, I look at our faces, and I try to trace present and future beliefs and affiliations. I scan the photo most intensely for explanations of the racism that raises its ugly head at the most awkward times in my own psyche indelibly formed by this and other events tied to my home town.

"And our faces, my heart, brief as photos."