jack

I was thrilled to be informed last night of the new mapping of Roman roads, almost doubling the previously known mileage of the mid-second century CE. Naturally it has produced an interactive dataset, Itiner-e. I am waiting for the sea-roads to come online, but in the meantime I could walk from Durovernum to Segontium in about five days, more or less up the A5. Colpeper would flip. The smaller, less paved, less historically continuous routes are even neater, flooded under modern dams or trodden between the constellations of villas. "The roads are anywhere that the Romans walked."

Because it would otherwise have closed before I could see it, for the first time in five years and ten months I made it out to the MFA to see Deep Waters: Four Artists and the Sea, a meditation on marginalization, migration, and the sea as site of simultaneous beauty and atrocity pairing John Singleton Copley's Watson and the Shark (1778) and J. M. W. Turner's Slave Ship (Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying, Typhoon Coming On) (1840) with Ayana V. Jackson's Some People Have Spiritual Eyes I & II (2020) and John Akomfrah's Vertigo Sea (2015). This last is a three-screen video installation subtitled Oblique tales on the aquatic sublime, which turns out to mean a breath-stealing churn of jewel-like navigations from black smokers through kelp forests to polar sheets against which is always playing the human use of the sea as unrenewable dump-site, the extraction of furs and oils and the disposal of bodies including a reenactment of the Zong massacre as if captured in the same grainily archival footage as the foundering vessels of Vietnamese boat people or the winter hunting of bears at Spitsbergen, the floe-slither of seals, the shoal-flick of egrets, the unzipping of a whale aboard a modern factory ship and the head-on gaze of enslaved faces whose humanity has outlasted the scientific racism that commissioned their immortalization by daguerreotype. Periodically one or more of the panels fills with theatrically historical tableaux, seaward figures stranded among a litter of clocks and chairs, bicycles and bones, a pram, a golliwog doll. The aristocratically scarlet-coated, tricorned Black man who surmounts the foreshore like a traveler by Caspar David Friedrich is Olaudah Equiano, enigmatically presiding like the memory of the Middle Passage. The soundtrack similarly interweaves journalism and opera, Nietzsche and Woolf, Melville and Heathcote Williams. It runs 48 minutes and is a hypnotically visceral, gorgeously difficult watch. It doesn't hijack the static art so much as it seems to gather it up, like a great wave. That it is ten years old has outworn none of its urgency on colonialism, immigration, the environment; it hit me much harder than I had imagined and I do not regret it. The waves I grew up with always knock you down.

To my bitter disappointment, I could not get an adequate photo walking home after sunset with only my phone for a camera, but the combination of a local porch-hung pride flag with the action of the wind on its accompanying anatomical model left over from Halloween now produces what I feel would be a respectably Chuck Tingle title: Mooned by the Gay Skeleton.