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            There are a great many things I remember experiencing in my lifetime. I promise, though, that this is not one of those ‘you never had it so good’ lectures that some of us have heard in the past. I’m more interested in considering changes that have occurred that have impacted my expressive work.

            As a boy I was ignorant of many things in the world and learned of others decades after they had occurred. The Second World War, for example, was something my parents had lived through, and I learned much about it in the school and public libraries I had access to as a young student. Among friends we told each other stories of what we knew about our fathers and their war experiences. Back issues of Life and Look magazines helped me piece together those war years along with books, especially books of photographs, that showed me the brutality of war that didn’t quite fit with the films of the forties that glorified and romanticized the American war effort. These were my first experiences with propaganda.

            During the fifties there was the cold war, atom bomb tests shown on TV, advertisements for bomb shelters, the silly and useless air raid exercises we did at school, the air raid siren that announced the noon hour, emergency broadcast tests on television when the abstract test patterns would interrupt regularly scheduled programs, the popular TV series I Led Three Lives where Richard Carlson played a double agent to infiltrate communist groups, the McCarthy hearings and some of my folk music heroes who testified (or refused to testify) before HUAC, and all this coincided with my initiation into racism and segregation, civil rights, activism on the part of the local Klan, the horrors of Viet Nam, Buddhist monks self-immolating, strung-out soldiers committing atrocities, government corruption and misinformation, and my ultimately becoming a conscientious objector.

            The space race, Sputnik, cosmonauts, the birth of NASA, landing on the moon, assassinations and a world turned upside down, idealism and cynicism, early computers, Pac Man, cpu’s and rapidly expanding chips, the internet, global community, faster and faster processors, Earth Day, Silent Spring, pesticides, mutually assured destruction, red tides, satellites in space, Voyager, the Space Shuttle, more assassinations, Cambodia, Watergate, the Pentagon Papers, riots in the streets, gas shortages – and so much more… all the while art was undergoing its own transformation from naturalism to impressionism to cubism to social realism to Pop to Abstract Expressionism, cool and hot, performance art, environmental sculpture, happenings, combines, multi-media, drug-induced fantasies and anger-fomented protests, the Great Society, corporate greed, religious fundamentalism, suicide bombers, Scud missiles, cultic fantasies, and terrorism. All of this on that blue marble spinning continuously, no borders, no boundaries, but so many degrees of separation, one eye to the distant quasars and one eye to the nano-sphere, no time it seems for self-reflection in spite of multiple genuflections. Concrete, arcane, mysterious, ambiguous, and ambivalent.