[Ed: I will continue with these remembrances, in the moment this is all I can manage to compose.]
I’m tired of writing remembrances, each one reminds of the passing, fading nature of be-ing. I don’t need to be reminded that Life closes off, a box canyon with sheer varigated walls, cross-cut sediments of past-time on display. Fossilized life, fragments of bone, amber protrude from the sheer layered walls. Evidence of those who went before. Where are they? what are they doing? Somehow, Anthony’s passing clears something away, psychically: that he has made the transition, into the Bardo, and beyond. Not that he deserved it at his age, but that he was released from the physical ravages that cancer was imposing on his body. Following him, and the expanding number of others, will perhaps be less terrifying.
I met Anthony on the way out the door of Parson’s photo department building on 5th Avenue, just north of Washington Square Park, in the fall of 1985.
“The primary principle of this age in the West is decay.”
Yup. That resonated, still does. As elsewhere noted, that profound and concise observation marked the beginning of a long friendship that explored the surfaces of the world and the energies and patterns of flow behind those surfaces. It maintained itself for 34 years despite the infrequent crossings-of-path. Aside for a year or so when we were house-mates in a couple places in Boulder, it took the form of a rich correspondance along with the occasional meetings-up that were always electric. Princeton, Manhattan, Peters Valley, Newton, and then all the locales experienced on a handful of profound road-trips in the US West. Death Valley (including a legendary night in Las Vegas on New Years Eve — photographing the insanity of the place); across the Rez’ in Arizona, picking up hitch-hikers; dealing with extreme weather transiting the Colorado Rockies; time at the Great Sand Dunes; and all the while, closely observing the perfidy of the contemporary capitalist oligarchies and, if nothing else, making fun of it. National Dead People. Stick Puppets on Display. The George P. Schultz Delirium Tremens Telephone. He left the East Coast in 1987 or so, and engaged in a long meander around the West, deeply influenced by his encounters with the Native American cultures and histories. His passionate, spirited, sensitive, and brilliant intellect — a full-spectrum laser — initiated a reducing flux that operated powerfully in his poetic work. None of it easily consumed, he did not share it with more that a handful of people ever.
Our last day shared together was in 2014, a long one spent at the Met, wandering through Strawberry Fields and Central Park, and dinner at the Whole Foods cafeteria on the Upper West Side near his mother’s flat where he’d been living for a few years. He had been worn down by the ignominy of working in the retail “adrenalized sporting complex”. But he had also met Maite, a Catalonian woman, who he joined in Barcelona in 2016. Best that he was out of the US for the repugnance of oligarchy and destruction that has ensued.
The written word was his primary medium in more recent years, although his photographic work was an important and powerful expression as well. It was the case, however, that he was intensely private, and most of his creative output came in the form of letters, and for the last decade more than a thousand emails that included an image, a dense poetic work, or a carefully laid-out pdf word piece, or some combination of those. In the mid-80s he did have a few prose pieces published in Marvin Jones’ The New Common Good in New York City, as their “Western Correspondent”. The only one I have a copy of is an excerpt of “The Tourist“. All of his negatives and writings up to relatively recently were apparently lost to flooding at his mother’s place in Princeton. It appears that I am more-or-less the sole holder of his remaining artistic legacy: with a fat folder of beautifully hand-penned communications.
From a letter I wrote to Anthony, back in 1991, from what was home, then, Reykjavík:
There is a bit of nostalgia in my mind, but more, there is the respect for you as a creator, discoverer, synthesist, See-er, and, um, Voice-of-Consciousness from the Mouth of Chaos, more or less. (I find meself writing in Literal ways these days, unable to couch clearly or veil rightly, no figures dancing between the words). I have your three cards sitting, always self-aware, they are, there on the desk next to the Printer. In a small attic space, ceiling too low for me to stand, but fine to write, skylights at my back open to a 20-hour sun day. (Fela doin’ “Zombie”). I can feel the plasma mass pressure of the sun Light pressing down, trying to flatten the landscape into a line, a mote, but the earth is in constant retching here, heaving basalt sky-ward, building sites, Places for the People to live. You have fed me bits from a variety of Others — Others speaking about Others — or a saying about unsay-able things or, yes, That which is … … … Thank you.
