Statement

Perfection is disgusting.

Keep your crisp lines and orderly ontologies. I want blood and tears. I don't want to be clean. I want things that have been destroyed at the molecular level and put back together; reborn. I don't want to live forever. I want to die forever. To feel what life worth living and losing feels like.

Betwixt and Between

My mouth is Jewish and my tongue is Slavic; by which I mean to say that I have tasted and savored the seventy seven subtle shades of suffering and can speak the words: this, too, is holy. But that's just my body we are talking about. I identify as non-existent.

Failure as Praxis

From fucking up, I have learned everything I know worth knowing. Success is when you haven’t tried hard enough to fuck up well and good.

Mystic Bricolage

Tohu va bohu, undifferentiated stuff. Is something made only by fabricating whole-cloth? Or is it made mostly in differentiation?

Those who Can't

Teaching is really the whole point of all of it. Not teaching because I know something, anything, that someone else doesn't. But because to catch lightning you need a jar. I've become a pretty good jar, I'd say.

Community Feeling

Alfred Adler said something beautiful about what happens when we see each other as comrades, not adversaries. And Buber said something beautiful about what happens when we see each other, truly. I say that in a Mexican stand-off, someone has to be the first one to lower their gun. But my wife says "Zac, you are too trusting."

On the question: What kind of art do you make?

The absolute worst. With whatever is available, with whatever is obsessing me. As John Waters said, "Technique is nothing more than failed style." Or at least that's what Google says he said.

Who thought they were only mad when Baltimore gleamed with supernatural ecstasy.

I read it in Howl when I was 15. I didn't get it then.

Selected Work.

(click to view)

Chants of Rust: The Urach K'Dejn. Zymoglyphic Museum Residency. 2024.

A Diary of Symbols and Lines. 2023-2024.