My Horse Fox
With one last sneer in my direction, she tweezed the pineapple from the fork with her lips.
‘I don’t remember having a deformed oal, but I must have.’
She might decide to take off at a gallop, at the edge of an uncut hayfield, while I scream.
Before Robert and I moved to the Mesa in southwest New Mexico, I lived in upstate New York near the Finger Lakes and the Cargill salt mines. The mines got the salt from under Seneca Lake. When I was there, sometimes men asked me timidly, “Tama, why do all these middle-aged women suddenly start riding horses? Is there something sexual?”
“No,” I said. “There are only two types of young girls. Those who identify as a girl, and those who identify as a horse. When they grow up, or when their kids have gone, or when they retire and have some extra money, they fulfill their dream of owning and learning to ride a horse.”
“And the others?”
“They get designer handbags. Only one percent of the population ends up with both.”
“What about men?”
“Men don’t have the ‘horse thing.’ Unless they grow up riding when they are young, they don’t have interest as adults. The non-rider men are …
Good Riddance to Shepard Fairey’s Awful ‘Hope’ Posters
How André the Giant became Barack Obama
Laughing at ‘Hope’ made you an asshole
The message of both posters was actually the same: OBEY
The Obama “Hope” Poster, probably the most iconic image from American politics of the last thirty years, is also the most famous work by artist Shepard Fairey. In it, a photograph taken from an Obama press junket was restyled into Fairey’s signature graphic style, forged through his early years as a creator of iconic stickers and stencils for skateboards and T-shirts. Heavily reworked and flattened into bold colors, it reframed Obama as an icon of new leadership, marked by the single fat, sans-serif word: Hope. Once it became officially embraced by the Obama campaign, the image emerged as an emblem of his presidential run and an icon of Democratic Party progressivism. It gave the campaign a grassroots life, eventually becoming its de facto symbol. After his victory, Obama thanked Fairey directly in a letter.
This wasn’t Fairey’s first foray into viral imagery. He had initially generated …
The Bullshit Artist
Plenty of writers are full of shit. Then there is James Wakefield Burke.
The unlikely tale of how J.W. and I collaborated with Johnny Cash on what became a Disney movie about Davy Crockett.
Those Elvis tapes are fake, though.
Of all the authors I have known, James Wakefield Burke (1906-1989) was the most memorable. He was not a great writer, or even a good one. But J.W., as he was known, was a quintessentially American type: the bullshit artist.
I met him in 1985, when I was 23 years old and finishing graduate studies at Yale and researching what became my narrative poem, The Alamo. The only source for some of the books I needed for my research was Eakin Press, a small publishing company in Austin. During a trip to Austin to visit my family one Christmas, the founder and publisher of the press, Ed Eakin, with whom I had corresponded, arranged for me to dine at a Mexican restaurant with him and an author named J.W. Burke. “He’s a bit of a character,” Ed Eakin warned me in advance. Indeed, J.W. turned out to be a bald fellow in his seventies in a fire-engine red suit and white shoes in a style that might be …
