Intransigent Poets Present


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Beautiful Doom: Heizer's "City" and Scott's "Blade Runner"

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There’s a striking similarity between Douglas Trumbull and Ridley Scott’s pyramidal design for the “Tyrell Corporation” headquarters in Blade Runner (1982) and the photos I’ve seen of Michael Heizer’s monumental plaza, Complex City , which has been under construction in Garden Valley, Nevada since 1972.  I’ve not seen any evidence that Trumbull & Scott would’ve been influenced by Heizer. I think the resemblance is probably nothing more than some shared archaeological interests. Still, I love the fact of the resemblance, because it really opens up a web of thinking about art and architecture’s relationship to the future. Both works explicitly and implicitly imagine futures, and both works have monumental properties:  they commemorate the present for a viewer in distant time. I want to start by outlining the web of connections, here: Both City  and Tyrell Corporation are obviously pyramid st ructures, and the structures really are similar—it’s as if Heizer’...
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This World: Hunter Bear / Dr. John Salter Jr.

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            One of my American Heroes is Hunter Gray, also known as Hunter Bear, whose name was Dr. John Salter, Jr., when he taught a class in social justice that I took at the University of North Dakota.   At the time, I was 19, coming  out of a small, Minnesota town, and had never met someone who’d both 1) been a key figure in the national struggle for civil rights, playing a key part in the 1963 Woolrich lunch counter protests in Jackson, Mississippi (that's him being assaulted in the foreground of the photo at left), and also 2) been “abducted” and studied by friendly beings from another planet.   Most students found him really captivating, or at least quirky and interesting, and for me, meeting him was challenging —his life was hard to assimilate .   On the one hand, you had to put your body on the line for causes you believed in;   I still have a hard time imagining myself exhibiting the courage that...
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Layli Long Soldier's "38"

I'm reading Whereas, by Layli Long Soldier, and in the poem "38," linked here , I learned some history about the Dakota 38 and the "Sioux Uprising" of 1862, also known as "The Dakota War of 1862" (as an aside, this is the same historical event involved in the controversy at the Walker Art Center over the sculpture, "Scaffold." Long Soldier's poem was published by Graywolf, out of Minneapolis. It wouldn't surprise me if the poem was part of what catalyzed the Walker's awareness of the issue, but... that's just me speculating). I learned many things in the poem: I learned about the 38 men who were executed. I learned about Lincoln's presidency and the historical record of his presidency. I learned about the commemorative horseback ride each winter, preserving the memory of the events and of the 38 who were executed. And I learned of Andrew Myrick, who was killed in that conflict. When asked about the condition of the s...
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