I have posted the beginnings of this extended feature as comments an this article on Texas Monthy The Texas GOP Has a Plan to Make Part of New Mexico New Texas
I just felt this was a prime opportunity to say a few things and was having so much fun it actually it got a bit out of hand. I wouldn’t blame you if you can’t make it through the whole 6,000 words of it. But I have to admit it is a pretty good read.

So top off your coffee cup, get comfy and have a read.

To start, in case you haven’t heard, the Gulf of Mexico is now the Gulf of Cecil. I have a map to prove it. I named the gulf after me when Trump decided it was Gulf of America. So next time you head down to what was formerly called Padre Island which is now called The Isle of Cecil, remember that you are stepping into the Gulf of Cecil.

Myself, I am a native Texan born in Austin but I live in New Mexico. I consider the antics of the current Republican Party or perhaps I should say the Rethuglican Party, an embarrassment to all Texans. Ted Cruz? I rest my case.

OK, onto the main topic...

The Big Bend Reconsidered

There are moments in public life when a proposal arrives that is so casually unmoored from reality that it invites, almost obliges, a response in kind. Not out of spite, but out of symmetry. A kind of civic call and response.

Recently, the good people of Texas, through the procedural imagination of Speaker Dustin Burrows, have taken up the question of whether certain counties of New Mexico might be better off under Texan stewardship. Not action, not yet. A study. A consideration. A thoughtful leaning over the fence line with a measuring tape and a gleam in the eye.

Very well.

If we are now entering an era of speculative cartography, New Mexico would like to submit its own modest proposal.

We propose to extend our eastern border southward in a clean, elegant descent to the Mexican frontier, incorporating the region presently known as Big Bend National Park and its surrounding lands into the greater cultural and ecological body of New Mexico.

We offer this not as a provocation, but as a gesture of balance. If maps are to become conversational again, let us converse properly.

There is, after all, a certain logic to the matter. The land itself has been making quiet arguments for millennia. The deserts do not recognize Austin. The mountains do not report to committees. The river bends according to older instructions than any legislature has yet managed to draft. The great sweep of that region - basin, sky, canyon, silence - speaks in a dialect far more closely aligned with the long vocabulary of New Mexico than with the administrative ambitions of distant offices.

One might say the land has already voted. It simply has not yet been asked in the correct language.

Texas, for its part, has always possessed a certain largeness of personality. One hesitates to call it expansionist. It is more of a habitual stretching, a reflexive reaching toward the horizon as though the horizon were a suggestion rather than a boundary. This has produced many admirable qualities - confidence, scale, a certain operatic sense of self. It has also, from time to time, produced the impression that everything visible might be improved by being Texan.

We do not entirely disagree. We simply believe that principle should be applied with reciprocity.

If southeastern New Mexico can be imagined as Texan, then Big Bend can certainly be imagined as New Mexican. The symmetry is almost mathematical. One could sketch it on a napkin. One could present it to a committee. One could commission a study.

And why stop there. Let us convene a panel of geologists, poets, ranchers, and those who have spent a night alone under that West Texas enormous sky. Let us ask them where the line truly runs. Not the inherited line, but the lived one. The one that reveals itself somewhere between the last paved road and the first clear recognition that the world is larger than any claim placed upon it.

We suspect their answer would not arrive in the language of jurisdiction.

There is also a matter of aesthetics. New Mexico, as a shape, would benefit from a more graceful extension. A southern reach. A continuity of gesture. The map would breathe differently. It would feel less like a compromise and more like a sentence completed.

Texas, in turn, would lose nothing essential. It would remain vast. It would remain Texas. It would continue, as it always has, to contain multitudes, contradictions, and an admirable ability to take itself both very seriously and not seriously enough.

We are, in this sense, offering a service.

Of course, we understand the practicalities. Such a change would require agreements, legislatures, and the slow machinery of federal approval. It would require signatures, hearings, and a great many documents stamped in ink. It would require, in short, reality to reassert itself.

But that is not quite the point.

The point is that maps are not only records. They are expressions of desire. They reveal how a place imagines itself in relation to its neighbors, its resources, its future. And when one state begins to imagine the rearrangement of another, it opens a small and curious door.

We have simply stepped through it.

So let this proposal stand. Not as a demand, but as a mirror. Not as a plan, but as a clarification.

If we are to redraw the lines, let us at least admit that we are drawing them with the same human hand that draws everything else - with a mixture of reason, appetite, humor, and the faint suspicion that the land itself is quietly amused.

In the meantime, the river will continue to bend. The desert will continue to speak in its slow, precise grammar. And the maps will wait, as they always do, for someone to come along and imagine them otherwise.

#Texas #annexNewMexico #WestTexasPolitics #ElPaso #BigBend #Southwest #SouthwestCulture #TexasPolitics #NewMexicoPolitics #Borderlands #DesertLife #AmericanWest #WesternCulture #PoliticalSatire #Satire #RegionalPolitics #MountainTime #ElPasoTexas #Marfa #Terlingua #Presidio #Wink #BigBendCountry #DesertHumor #AnnexWestTexas, #annextwoNewMexicocounties

On the Practical Advantages of a More Elegant Border

Let us now leave aside, for a moment, the higher poetry of geography, the spiritual rights of deserts, the whispered self-determination of mesas, and all such noble atmospheric matters, and consider instead the question in the plain, hard, practical language so beloved by committees, appropriations boards, defense contractors, and men who wear lanyards at regional policy conferences.

What, precisely, would be the advantages to each state if the eastern border of New Mexico were simply extended in one clean vertical line all the way south to Mexico?

The answer, upon sober reflection, is: many.

Indeed, one is surprised no one has yet had the courage, or the cartographic imagination, to propose it more forcefully.

To begin with, New Mexico would gain what every serious southwestern state ought to possess in abundance: additional federally useful emptiness.

This is not a criticism. It is an asset category.

New Mexico has long understood that one of the great hidden currencies of the American West is not merely land, but land upon which the federal government feels comfortable conducting things it would prefer not to explain in detail. It is a rare and underappreciated specialization. While other states clutter themselves with population, commerce, and suburban entitlement, New Mexico has maintained a proud and disciplined relationship with remoteness.

That remoteness has already proven useful in matters of national security, advanced secrecy, improbable aircraft, atmospheric ambiguities, and the occasional project whose budget is blacker than the night sky over the Jornada del Muerto.

By extending the border southward, New Mexico would acquire additional acreage for the storage, concealment, testing, misplacement, rediscovery, and plausible denial of all manner of sensitive national endeavors. You know, nuclear warheads and such.

Should the federal government ever decide that it once again needs more room for blowing shit up in the name of peace, deterrence, freedom, or the general maintenance of geopolitical confidence, New Mexico would be able to respond in the mature, civic-minded manner for which it is known:

“Yes, we believe we can accommodate that.”

There would be more room for:

• missile ranges,

• secret hangars,

• underground facilities,

• suspiciously unmarked roads,

• fenced compounds with signs that say NO TRESPASSING - USE OF DEADLY FORCE AUTHORIZED,

• and, naturally, more secure locations in which to hide aliens and their technology from the general public.

And let us be honest here. If one is going to hide extraterrestrial technology anywhere in the United States, one does not tuck it behind a Chili’s outside Dallas. One places it somewhere with proper atmosphere. Somewhere with dignity. Somewhere with enough silence, dust, and military signage to support the mythology.

New Mexico already has a strong brand in this department. What it lacks is simply a little more elbow room.

This proposal would remedy that.

Now let us turn, with equal fairness, to the advantages for Texas.

Texas, as everyone knows, is forever complaining about the burden of protecting the southern border with stunts like bussing Over 100,000 Migrants To Sanctuary Cities and proud of it. This complaint has become one of the state’s most enduring folk traditions, right alongside brisket, boosterism, and saying the phrase “energy independence” with the gravity of a religious sacrament.

The border, we are told, is expensive. Difficult. Lengthy. Burdensome. Vast stretches of river, desert, and ranchland must be monitored, patrolled, surveilled, dramatized, televised, and periodically used as a backdrop for gubernatorial photography.

Very well.

What if New Mexico, in a spirit of regional cooperation and neighborly sacrifice, simply took nearly half of the miles of that border off Texas’s hands?

Think of the relief.
Think of the savings.
Think of the emotional release.

A significant portion of Texas’s border responsibilities would be gently transferred to a state far more temperamentally suited to the task. New Mexico, with its more meditative relationship to space and fewer compulsions toward theatrical overstatement, could manage the newly acquired stretch with a calmer hand and considerably less shouting.

Texas could then devote more of its precious time and treasure to:

• repairing its power grid,

• explaining its water future,

• litigating against books,

• build more data centers,

• or simply enjoying the reduced administrative stress of having slightly fewer miles in which to perform frontier masculinity for cable news.

This would be, in effect, a mercy annexation.

And there are secondary benefits as well.

A cleaner vertical border would be easier to understand. Easier to map. Easier to explain to schoolchildren. Easier to print on coffee mugs and souvenir tea towels. It would reduce visual clutter in the national imagination.

There is something deeply satisfying about a straight line carried through to completion. It has confidence. It has clarity. It says, “We meant this.”

The current arrangement, by contrast, feels like the result of a distracted clerk being called away mid-ruler.

No, if we are to be serious about governance, we must also be serious about line quality.

And there is one more advantage, perhaps the most important of all.

This proposal would allow both states to save face while pretending to act in the interest of mutual strategic necessity.

New Mexico could frame the expansion as a patriotic contribution to national defense, scientific advancement, and extraterrestrial containment logistics.

Texas could frame the cession as a fiscally responsible act of sovereign burden reduction and inter-state efficiency.

Both states would emerge claiming victory.

The federal government would nod gravely.

Consultants would invoice.

And the desert, as always, would absorb the absurdity with perfect composure.

Which is perhaps why this proposal feels, in its own ridiculous way, almost reasonable.

Not because it is likely.
Not because it is lawful.
Not because it is wise.

But because it has that distinctly American quality of sounding half insane and half administratively plausible at exactly the same time.

And if that is not the true spirit of the republic, it is at least one of its more durable operating principles.

#AnnexWestTexas #FreeTheClocks #NewMexico #Texas #WestTexas #MountainTime #ElPaso #Marfa #Terlingua #BigBend #Southwest #DesertPolitics #PoliticalSatire #Borderlands #WesternAbsurdity #MapCorrection #DesertRepublic #TexasHumor #NewMexicoHumor #WrongTimeline

On the Deep New Mexican Character of West Texas Place Names

And now we arrive at one of the strongest pieces of evidence in favor of this entirely reasonable border adjustment: the names have already chosen sides.

This, in truth, may be the most compelling argument of all.

Before one examines economics, military logistics, desert stewardship, or the proper storage of recovered alien propulsion systems, one must first ask a simpler and more intimate question:

What does the land call itself?

Because names matter. They are not incidental. They carry weather, memory, conquest, prayer, migration, trade, grief, inheritance, and the old mouth-shapes of those who stood there before surveyors came along with rulers and federal confidence.

And when one looks westward across that stretch of Texas under discussion, one finds not a robust field of aggressively Anglo certainty, but an entire landscape already speaking in a voice that sounds suspiciously, unmistakably, and quite respectably New Mexican.

Take El Paso.

I ask you, with complete seriousness: does this not already sound like a city that should be in New Mexico?

It does.

It has the dignity. It has the cadence. It has the proper desert syllables. It does not sound like a place that should be governed by distant men in polished boots holding press conferences about freedom while standing in front of a Buc-ee’s billboard. It sounds like a place where one should be able to buy a burrito, hear three languages before noon, and encounter a retired ceramicist with profound opinions about saints, coyotes, and chile.

In other words, it sounds New Mexican.

Then there is Marfa.

Marfa? Come now.

That is not merely acceptable to New Mexico. That is practically overqualified. It already sounds like a small, mysterious art town full of weathered adobe walls, conceptual installations, dogs sleeping under pickup trucks, and a former sculptor living in semi-voluntary obscurity while making impossible furniture from salvaged wood and speaking only when necessary.

That is not foreign territory. That is family.

And what of Presidio?

Presidio is so New Mexican in temperament that one suspects it has simply been waiting, politely and without complaint, for the paperwork to catch up.

Terlingua? Entirely plausible New Mexico.
Alpine? A little less obvious perhaps, but still perfectly assimilable after a brief orientation and some exposure to proper chile governance.
Fort Davis? Slightly more Texan in posture, yes, but not beyond rehabilitation.

One could go on.

The point is not that these places are not Texan in the current bureaucratic sense. The point is that their names, atmospheres, and existential frequencies suggest a more nuanced identity. They already belong to the greater Southwestern sentence that New Mexico speaks more fluently than perhaps any other state in the union.

Texas, by contrast, often behaves as though every town within its borders must participate in the same giant statewide personality cult. But this is simply not true. Texas contains many Texases. There is the oil Texas, the cattle Texas, the suburban stadium Texas, the finance Texas, the megachurch Texas, the border Texas, the weird artsy Texas, the German-Texas, the Tejano Texas, the hill-country dream Texas, and the Texas that would very much prefer not to be included in whatever the governor is currently yelling about.

West Texas, especially along that long desert stretch, has always seemed to exist in a slightly different register. It is drier in spirit, quieter in posture, more spacious in its thinking. It is less interested in spectacle and more willing to let the sky do the talking.

That is a New Mexican trait if ever there was one.

In fact, one might say that the further west Texas goes, the less Texan it becomes and the more it begins to remember something older, stranger, slower, and more desert-shaped.

Which is to say: it begins to behave like New Mexico.

This is not an insult to Texas. It is, if anything, a compliment. It means that even Texas, in its western reaches, eventually improves.

And let us also note the linguistic dignity of the matter.

New Mexico is a state whose atmosphere has long been shaped by Spanish, Indigenous, frontier, Catholic, Mexican, Anglo, mystical, military, artistic, and plain old desert influences all jumbled together into a kind of weathered cultural braid. Its place names do not merely label locations. They often sound like they are carrying history in a clay bowl.

West Texas place names already fit comfortably into that bowl.

No one would blink if one heard of a road trip passing through El Paso, Presidio, and Terlingua on the way to some obscure shrine, abandoned mission, artist residency, or highly questionable but unforgettable café. In fact, it sounds less like a crossing of state lines than a coherent itinerary.

That coherence should not be ignored.

It is the map, once again, lagging behind the deeper truth.

For names are often wiser than governments. They persist. They carry forward what the land remembers even when official boundaries become clumsy, arbitrary, or politically overcaffeinated.

So yes, this proposed border correction is supported not only by military logic, fiscal generosity, alien storage capacity, and humanitarian border relief for our overburdened Texan neighbors.

It is also supported by the simple and obvious fact that many of these towns are already, in name and in spirit, perfectly respectable New Mexican places.

The paperwork, as always, is merely the final stage of recognition.

#Leacounty #Rooseveltcounty #Annex #annexation #RepublicofNewTexico #secession

On the Linguistic Self-Exposure of “West Texas”

Once one begins to examine the matter linguistically, one discovers that Texas has already confessed.

The phrase itself gives the whole thing away:

West Texas.

Now let us pause and look at that carefully.

Not simply Texas.
Not proudly and indivisibly Texas.
But West Texas.

A qualification. A caveat. A directional disclaimer.

An internal footnote.

The phrase carries within it the unmistakable sound of a people saying, in effect:

“Yes, yes, technically it’s ours… but it’s a little different out there.”

And there it is.

That is how empires talk about their borderlands. That is how central authorities refer to regions that have always sat a little outside the emotional, cultural, and atmospheric center of the thing. It is the language of partial belonging. The vocabulary of managed ambiguity.

No one says East Texas with the same nervous explanatory energy, because East Texas is not under suspicion. It is securely Texan. It is soaked in the proper statewide broth. It carries the approved flavor profile. But West Texas always arrives in conversation with a faint tone of exception, as though the speaker is trying to reassure both themselves and the listener that, while things may become geologically or spiritually irregular out there, one need not panic.

It remains, for the time being, within the paperwork.

But the phrase tells the truth.

Because if a region must constantly be described as a directional variation of the parent identity, that usually means it is already drifting toward another one.

This is basic cultural tectonics.

You can hear it elsewhere:

• West Berlin

• West Bank

• Western frontier

• the West End

• the Western Territories

Such names do not merely indicate position. They indicate threshold.

And threshold is precisely what West Texas is.

It is not Texas proper in the full ceremonial sense. It is Texas becoming uncertain at the edges. Texas thinning into desert. Texas entering a zone where its usual assumptions begin to lose altitude. Texas wandering so far into silence, distance, Spanish place names, mountain light, and metaphysical weather that it gradually ceases to behave like itself.

At a certain point, one is simply watching Texas slowly become New Mexico without wanting to admit it.

This is why the term West Texas is so revealing.

It is the verbal equivalent of a man introducing his cousin by saying, “He’s family, but he’s… different.”

Different how?

Well.
Quieter.
Older somehow.
Less impressed by volume.
More comfortable with empty space.
More likely to contain an abandoned mission, an art installation, a ghost town, three dogs sleeping in shade, and a man named Rafael who knows things he has no intention of putting online.

In other words:
New Mexican.

And if we are being honest, the phrase West Texas has always had a faint undertone of administrative denial.

It sounds less like a place fully integrated into the Texan psyche and more like a holding category for land that never quite submitted to the brand.

It is the state’s way of saying:

“This is still us, technically, though we admit it has become rather strange and beautiful and difficult to govern according to our usual habits.”

Exactly.

That is how provinces become borderlands.
That is how borderlands become arguments.
That is how arguments become maps.

In fact, one could make the case that the entire phrase West Texas is merely a temporary placeholder for the more accurate and historically honest term:

Eastern New Mexico South.

Or, if one wishes to preserve local dignity and transitional stability:

The Lower New Mexican Extension Zone.

Naturally, this would require tasteful signage and a modest public education campaign.

But the principle stands. And don’t worry, we’ll work it out ourselves.

When Texans themselves instinctively speak of that region as a directional exception, they are already acknowledging that it belongs to a different interior world than Dallas, Houston, Austin, or even the mythic self-image Texas prefers to project onto itself.

West Texas is what happens when Texas wanders too far into the desert and begins, against its own intentions, to attain depth.

And depth, as we know, is dangerous.

Depth leads to reflection.
Reflection leads to humility.
Humility leads to adobe.
Adobe leads, inevitably, to New Mexico.

This is simply the natural order of things.

So yes, the very phrase West Texas is less a regional descriptor than a quiet confession.

It is Texas speaking under oath and hoping no one notices.

And now, regrettably for them, we have noticed.

On the Cinematic Case for the Transfer of West Texas

#NewMexicoFilm #FilmedInNewMexico #NewMexicoFilmmaker #NewMexicoFilmmaking #NewMexicoCinema #FilmNewMexico #NMFilm #IndependentFilm #IndieFilm #Filmmaking #FilmProduction #LocationScouting #FilmLocation #SouthwestCinema #SouthwestFilm #DesertCinema #AlbuquerqueFilm #SantaFeFilm #LasCrucesFilm #MovieMaking

And now we arrive at what may be the most incontrovertible evidence of all:

cinema.

Because if politics can be evasive, and history can be selective, and maps can lie with a ruler and a straight face, film has a way of exposing the underlying truth.

And the truth is this:

If you are filming “West Texas,” you might as well just be filming in New Mexico.

In fact, very often, that is exactly what happens.

This is one of the great unspoken embarrassments of regional identity in the American Southwest. The visual mythology of “Texas” - especially the mythic, sparse, windswept, haunted, western, old-weird, frontier, desert, existential, post-cowboy Texas that people actually want in movies - is very often cinematically indistinguishable from New Mexico.

Or, worse for Texas, it is sometimes better achieved in New Mexico.

And why?

Because New Mexico has long since mastered the art of being the distilled visual essence of the American West.

It does not merely contain western landscapes. It contains the idea of westernness in a more concentrated and photogenic form. It has the proper horizons. It has the proper weathering. It has the proper silence. It has the right ratio of ruin to sky.

It knows how to stand there and look like destiny.

This is why filmmakers love it.

When a director wants:

• a morally ambiguous desert,

• a town where something ominous happened in 1887 and perhaps again last Tuesday,

• a borderland of heat, distance, dust, and consequence,

• a road that appears to lead toward either revelation or death,

• or a horizon vast enough to make a man reconsider his life choices,

they are, whether they know it or not, asking for New Mexico energy.

And what is West Texas, especially in the cinematic imagination, if not simply New Mexico with more state-sponsored self-regard?

Let us be blunt.

No one dreams of filming “suburban Texas.”
No one yearns to capture the spiritual mystery of six lanes of frontage road and a Cheesecake Factory near Plano.
That is not the Texas of filmic longing.

What filmmakers want is the desert edge, the lonely gas station, the faded motel, the border-town twilight, the empty highway at dusk, the mountains beyond legality, the wind moving through old signage, the sense that civilization is present only on probation.

That is the West Texas package.

And that package is already, aesthetically and atmospherically, fully compatible with New Mexico.

One might even argue that New Mexico has spent decades serving as the stunt double for the Southwest’s deeper subconscious, while Texas has too often been busy insisting on top billing.

If the visual DNA matches, if the architecture harmonizes, if the light behaves correctly, if the desert agrees, and if the camera cannot tell the difference, then one must ask the obvious administrative question:

Why maintain the fiction?

Why force productions to navigate this emotional and bureaucratic redundancy?

Why continue pretending that “West Texas” is some wholly separate cinematic species when every director, cinematographer, location scout, and weathered character actor with a squint and a flask already knows what time it is?

It is New Mexico-adjacent at minimum.
At best, it is simply pre-recognized New Mexico.

And let us not ignore the practical implications.

By formally incorporating West Texas into New Mexico, the state would become even more attractive as a one-stop production environment for all desert, borderland, neo-western, apocalyptic, revisionist, noir-western, post-frontier, alien-contact, cartel-adjacent, mystical-road-movie, and “man-in-hat-walks-silently-across-parking-lot” genres.

Think of the efficiency.

No more awkward disclaimers:

• “Set in Texas, filmed in New Mexico.”

• “Inspired by West Texas, shot outside Las Cruces.”

• “A Texas story captured in a state with better light and less administrative friction.”

The truth could finally be stated plainly.

And Texas, if it is wise, should welcome this.

Because there is no shame in handing off a region that is already living a double life on screen. In fact, it may come as a relief. Texas could then focus its cinematic brand on what it truly excels at:

• oil-money family sagas,

• courtroom swagger,

• football fathers,

• suspicious governors,

• megachurch parking lots,

• and tense conversations held over iced tea on very expensive porches.

A rich tradition in its own right.

But West Texas?
That belongs to the long, quiet, morally complicated visual narrative of New Mexico. Think Breaking Bad.

You can see it in the light.

And film, perhaps more than politics, is merciless about light.

A camera knows when a place is pretending.
A camera knows when a place belongs to a myth larger than its paperwork.
A camera knows when a region has wandered spiritually across a border long before any legislature has managed to catch up.

And what it knows, over and over again, is this:

If you are trying to film the haunted desert soul of West Texas,
you are already most of the way to New Mexico.

You may as well finish the trip.

#NewMexicoFilm #FilmedInNewMexico #NMFilm #FilmProduction #FilmCrew #ProductionLife #FilmIndustry #IndieFilm #SetLife #LocationScouting #FilmLocation #CrewLife #ProductionDesign #Cinematography #FilmDirector #FilmMaker #MovieSet #SouthwestFilm #AlbuquerqueFilm #SantaFeFilm

Even Time Refuses to Remain Texan

And now, perhaps the most elegant evidence of all.

Not geography.
Not language.
Not cinema.
Not military secrecy.
Not border management.
Not extraterrestrial storage logistics.

Time itself.

Because when one looks closely at the far western edge of Texas, one discovers something almost too perfect to have been invented:

Part of Texas already keeps New Mexico time.

This is not metaphor.
This is administration.

Places like El Paso and the surrounding western edge of Texas are already living by Mountain Time, while the rest of Texas remains in Central Time. Which is to say, in the most literal possible sense, West Texas is already operating on a different timeline than Texas proper.

And if that does not tell us something profound, then frankly nothing will.

Because what is a time zone, if not a civilization admitting where its true orientation lies?

Time zones are not decorative. They are among the deepest confessions a place can make. They reveal where a region actually lives in relation to work, weather, commerce, sunrise, travel, and the felt rhythm of ordinary existence. They are a daily act of alignment. A repeated agreement with the turning of the Earth.

And West Texas, in its farthest reaches, has already chosen. After all, whole doesn’t want to be in mountain time. That sound way cooler than central time any day of the week. Texans come to mountain time on vacation or have second homes here.

West Texas wakes with New Mexico.
It eats lunch with New Mexico.
It misses appointments with New Mexico.
It arrives at the hardware store, the dentist, and the funeral home with New Mexico.
Its clocks are already facing westward in spirit.

One could hardly ask for a clearer declaration of intent.

This means that the current situation is not merely a border anomaly. It is a temporal injustice.

Imagine the absurdity.

Imagine living your whole life under a state government whose emotional center is in one time zone, while your actual day unfolds in another. Imagine being administratively Texan while existentially New Mexican. Imagine knowing, every single morning, that your clock and your legislature are not in full agreement.

This is no way to run a republic.

What we are witnessing is not simply a discrepancy of convenience. It is a people being forced to inhabit the wrong narrative frame. They are, quite literally, living in the wrong timeline.

And this is where the beauty of the proposed border correction becomes undeniable.

By extending New Mexico’s eastern border southward in one clean vertical descent to Mexico, we would do more than adjust a line on a map.

We would heal a tear in spacetime.

Those current West Texans would at last be restored to their proper temporal habitat. Their civic identity would finally match the hour on the microwave, the dashboard clock, the church bulletin, and the feed store sign.

They would no longer have to endure the subtle psychic strain of belonging to one state while keeping time with another.

Their maps would match their mornings.

Their jurisdiction would match their sunlight.

Their paperwork would, at long last, catch up to their clocks.

This is not annexation.

This is chronological reconciliation.

One might even call it a humanitarian correction.

Because how many generations must a people endure the quiet bewilderment of waking up in one state and one metaphysical condition, only to discover that the capital governing them is operating according to a different noon?

This cannot continue.

There is a reason frontiers are often strange. They are not only geographical thresholds. They are often time leaks. Places where one reality begins to thin and another starts pressing through. West Texas, especially that far desert edge, has all the signs of such a condition. It already lives in a different light. It already speaks in a different register. It already bears the names, the silence, the cinematic atmosphere, the borderland temperament, and now, indisputably, the correct hour.

What more evidence is required?

At some point, the burden of proof shifts.

At some point, one must stop asking whether West Texas should become part of New Mexico and begin asking why we have tolerated this obvious temporal mismatch for so long.

A state line should not force a people to live in bureaucratic drag.

A people should not have to perform one identity while their clocks are loyally reporting another.

The clocks, unlike legislatures, have no ideology.
They simply tell the truth.

And the truth is this:

West Texas is already keeping New Mexico time because, in the deeper order of things, it already belongs to New Mexico.

The proposed border correction would merely formalize what time itself has been trying to tell us all along.

The land knew it.
The names knew it.
The filmmakers knew it.
The desert knew it.

And now, at last, the clocks have spoken.

#AnnexWestTexas #Texas #NewMexico #WestTexas #ElPaso #BigBend #Marfa #Southwest #Borderlands #PoliticalSatire #MountainTime #DesertPolitics #FreeTheClocks #WrongTimeline

The Only Intelligent Border Adjustment Left to Us

In conclusion…

Now that the matter has been given the serious, balanced, and multidisciplinary attention it so clearly deserves, the conclusion is unavoidable.

Once the evidence is gathered, arranged, and viewed in full, only one intelligent course of action remains before the American people:

West Texas should become part of New Mexico.

This is no longer a whimsical notion. It has advanced beyond jest into the far more dangerous territory of becoming obviously correct.

At first, one might have assumed the idea to be merely a satirical response to recent Texan fantasies of annexing portions of southeastern New Mexico. A playful mirror. A little desert mischief. But as often happens in public life, once the joke is allowed to breathe, it begins to reveal the more serious truth hiding beneath it.

And the truth, in this case, is almost embarrassingly clear.

The land itself has already made the case.
The names have already made the case.
The film industry has already made the case.
The border politics have made the case.
The military-industrial atmosphere has made the case.
And now, most decisively of all, time itself has made the case.

One by one, every supposedly minor detail has betrayed the same deeper pattern.

The region in question does not speak with the full accent of Texas proper. It does not move with the same rhythm. It does not carry the same psychic weather. It does not even keep the same hour.

It exists as a kind of cartographic afterthought - a magnificent, dry, cinematic, spiritually overqualified appendage hanging off the western side of Texas while already behaving, in every meaningful respect, like New Mexico.

This is not a criticism of Texas.

Texas has many admirable qualities. It is large, committed, theatrical, and capable of producing both excellent barbecue and a nearly uninterrupted stream of self-mythology. It has made an enormous contribution to the American experiment, particularly in the fields of oil extraction, state pride, and legislatively sanctioned overconfidence.

But one must be honest.

Not everything Texas touches becomes more Texan.
Sometimes, the further west it goes, the more it simply becomes desert.

And desert, if left alone long enough, tends to sort things into their proper essence.

That is what has happened here.

West Texas has been slowly clarified by exposure to distance, silence, mountain light, Spanish names, border weather, artistic eccentricity, geological dignity, and temporal noncompliance. In the process, it has become less a western province of Texas than a southern extension of New Mexico waiting for administrative recognition.

It is already halfway across the border in spirit.

What remains is simply to allow the map to catch up.

And let us not overlook the practical advantages.

New Mexico would gain additional strategic emptiness for all future federal endeavors involving classified projects, mysterious installations, and the periodic need to test whether something can be made louder, hotter, faster, or less explainable.

Texas, meanwhile, would be relieved of a meaningful portion of its southern border obligations, a burden about which it has complained with such theatrical consistency that one can only assume it would welcome any arrangement allowing it to complain slightly less.

The region’s towns already bear names of excellent New Mexican standing.

Its cinematic identity already belongs to New Mexico.

Its clock already belongs to New Mexico.

Its atmosphere, one might even say, already belongs to New Mexico.

At this point, the only thing still insisting otherwise is a line drawn by people who are all long dead and had no idea how many think pieces, cable-news segments, committee reports, and speculative alien-storage needs the future would eventually require.

Why should their confusion continue to govern us?

A nation must be willing, from time to time, to correct its lesser cartographic mistakes.

And if it cannot do so through wisdom, then at the very least it should do so through humor sharpened into insight.

That is where we now stand.

So let it be said plainly:

The transfer of West Texas into New Mexico is no longer merely an amusing possibility. It is, upon mature consideration, the only intelligent thing to do.

Not because it would solve every problem.
Not because Congress would ever permit it.
Not because Texas would surrender it without a fit of operatic indignation.

But because the proposal, absurd as it first appears, reveals with startling clarity how much of public reality is already absurd, and how often truth enters the room wearing the mask of a joke.

And in this case, the joke has become too well-supported to ignore.

The clocks have spoken.
The names have spoken.
The desert has spoken.
The camera has spoken.

All that remains is for the map to stop being stubborn.

Until then, West Texas will remain what it has quietly been for some time now:

New Mexico in exile.

Then there is the idea of New Texico where the same line is drawn to big bend that becomes a new independant state.

And now that is worked out, let’s consider Chihuahua, Mexico…

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https://donorbox.org/fundraise-for-a-short-film-family-tree

Help film maker Dimitri Nasennik create the short film “Family Tree”

The Story
It will be a 20–25 minute short comedy that tells the story of a foreigner traveling to a Ukrainian village to find his long-lost relatives.

Director Statement:

This story is based on my own experience searching for my relatives. Every summer during my childhood, we traveled from Estonia to Ukraine. Being so connected to Ukraine inspired me to build a family tree that now includes more than 500 people. I see so many people supporting Ukraine today, and I am certain that after our Victory, many of them will want to visit. Some will go to see the cities they only learned about during the war; others, like me, will go to find their roots. I want this story to be an inspiration for people to learn even more about Ukraine.

Director:
Dimitri Nasennik

The Goals

Short term
We are inviting as much as possible active-duty personnel with a background in cinema to join our cast and crew. For example, Alex (Blogger) from the 79th Brigade will be taking on a major role.

Mid-term
To raise funds through online ticket sales for limited community screenings of the movie. These funds will go as aid to the soldiers participating in our film. Last time, with “The Land We Fight For,” we raised 1.5 times the movie’s budget.
Watch trailer here:

Long-term
To enter the film into various international festivals. This will help tell our story and attract more attention to Ukraine. Because it is a comedy, it will be much easier to get into many festivals.

For more details of the movie concept, heroes, vision and statement, read here: https://docs.google.com/document/d/16suPR9_LtIGBvMdN3c-Ok8TgLELiVU57KqMVbMvJhBs/edit?usp=sharing

The Budget
Since we aim to reach festival audiences, we want to produce a film of the highest quality, which is reflected in our target goal. I tried to hold it as minimum as possible. For transparency, I’ve outlined all the costs in this spreadsheet: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1m0TPLWMqaTsA3Sx8jgRuFw-iSLdzg1Zyrlo3a-GLFfQ/edit?gid=1692803347#gid=1692803347

COLLAGE EXPEDITION - LOS ANGELES - 2025

JUST PUBLISHED
Join us for a behind-the-scenes look at Collage Expedition Los Angeles 2025 - a week-long gathering of collage artists exploring the city, hunting for materials, creating new work, and sharing the creative process together.

Fifteen artists came together in Los Angeles for an immersive week of collage art, artist collaboration, found material collecting, studio practice, and exhibition making. The expedition culminated in a one-day exhibition featuring the work created during the week.

Filmmaker Zach Touchon joined us as the expedition documentarian, capturing the experience and shaping it into this film.

If you are interested in collage art, mixed media, contemporary collage, artist residencies, creative process, or artist community, this film offers a glimpse into what happens when artists gather to make work in real time.

Upcoming Collage Expeditions in 2026:
Berlin - May 2026
London - June 2026

Interested in joining a future expedition?

Please email Les Jones and include links to your website and Instagram page or whatever digital platform you work can be seen on.

For more information:
hello@contemporarycollagemagazine.com

#CollageArt #ContemporaryCollage #MixedMediaArt #ArtistRetreat #CreativeProcess #CollageArtists #ArtistCommunity #FoundMaterials #VisualArt #ContemporaryArt #ArtDocumentary #StudioPractice #CollageExpedition #LosAngelesArt #MixedMediaArtists

PARTICIPANTS ON INSTAGRAM
@ClareSchmehl
@mizRobin
@DeniseEmanuelClemen
@CarolyneOliverArt
@RodneyBoone96
@JuliaWalck
@thecreativecalico
@denverjennifer
@cyeeeece
@decorativedebris
@InesKramerArt
@⁨CecilTouchon⁩
@LesJonesCollage
@gnmooreca
@Karen.Hirsch.18
@ZachTouchonArt

Don’t forget to contribute!

Cartolandia (Land of Boxes)

“Thanks the Lordy I have teeth and need no dentist. I can still fucking chew.” said Matthew

“Not me. I had my rotting teeth removed. All of them. I was on a liquid diet for a while, waiting for my beautiful plastic dentures. One on top, one on bottom. I take then out at night to soak them. Yeah, they are a little bit of a hassle. I wasn’t willing to pay another 8K for the guy to drill in a couple of tiny anchors into my jawbone so I just got expert at how I chew. But no more cavities and the worry of tooth aches driving you out of your mind.

The fucking dentists want to charge you to work on your teeth as if they are building a new car. I hate that shit. Fucking capitalism in healthcare. Bad idea. Everybody has to make a living but making a killing off of the suffering and basic needs of others… come on. Get real. Why do we all have to fuck each other over? We all are forced into it and it only makes sense in a sick way when you put the numbers to it.

The dentist doesn’t want to live in a cardboard box even in a pretty place like Cuernavaca, Mexico: The City of Eternal Spring.

A lot of people live in boxes there. The only part of the year you have to worry about is rainy season. These box living people are called paracaidistas, squatters living in shantytowns on federal right-of-way lands often called Cartolandia: Boxland. But Cuernavaca is perfect for this kind of living. You will never freeze to death.

It is the place where Cortez decided to build his own palace with native slaves after he kicked everybody’s asses in Mexico City – Chilangolandia. And it was on the upper balcony walls of Palacio de Cortés where Diego Rivera painted the famous murals - History of Morelos, Conquest and Revolution critiquing Cortez. I often studied these murals in person when I lived there for seven years. Such a great painter – Rivera.” said Cecil.

My friend Picasso (Bill) Gaglione sent me the above poster by mail inviting me to participate in the exhibition and I, in turn, am inviting you to participate.

Send mail art to the below address ASAP to arrive by May 1, 2026.

TO: ELIZABETH JOBIN
MUSÉE D’ART MODERNE ET CONTEMPORAIN (MAMCO)
13, RUE DES GRANGES
1204 GENÈVE, SWITZERLAND

Your work will be exhibited with all of the other mail art at the show and then become part of the collection of the MAMCO. Then you can add this group show to your exhibitions list for 2026 and to your collections list.

This call is an initiative of Picasso Gaglione for the exhibit. I strongly encourage you to participate.

QuickKopy Conceptualism: Bay Area Dada to Bay Area Punk

Museum of Modern and Contemporary Art Geneva

From the webpage:
”What goes into the making of an exhibition? This question is the focus of the seminar that will start in the fall of 2025, organized by MAMCO and held at HEAD – Genève (the Geneva University of Art and Design). A full academic year of collaborative work between the museum’s team, the students and guest researcher Branden W. Joseph will culminate in a public exhibition based on the Ecart Archives—the legacy of the 1970s Geneva-based artist collective of the same name.

The Ecart Archives reveal the Mail Art networks that existed outside institutional circles, linking alternative scenes in the Western world. One such example is the Bay Area Dadaists—an array of artists from San Francisco who were inspired by the Dadaist spirit of contestation and fascination for absurdity. The fanzines, collages, and performances created by figures such as Anna Banana, Bill Gaglione and Monte Cazazza found resonance in other scenes—in Canada (Image Bank, General Idea) and the United Kingdom (Cosey Fanni Tutti, Genesis P-Orridge)—and laid the early foundations for a nascent American punk scene. Through printed documents, videos, and audio recordings, the exhibition will piece together a previously untold story: that of artists claiming their right to be insolent and questioning meaning, gender, authority, and institutions.

With works by: John M Armleder, Audio Players, Anna Banana, Mindaugis Bagdon, Beauty Killers, Byron Black, Steve Caravello, Monte Cazazza, Charles Chickadel, Buster Cleveland, Bruce Conner, Dead Kennedys, Ecart, Irene Dogmatic, Janet Fries, Bill Gaglione, General Idea, Stu Horn (Northwest Mounted Valise), Ron Illardo, Ray Johnson, Glenn Lewis, Tim Mancusi, John Mitchell, Michael Morris, Poly Esther Nations, B Orealis, Genesis P-Orridge, Gregg Puchalski, Lisa Redlicks, The Residents, Winston Smith, Rick Soloway, SST, Patricia Tavenner, Throbbing Gristle, Vincent Trasov, Cosey Fanni Tutti, V Vale, May Wilson, and Graeme Whifler (and performance footage of the Avengers, Dils, Mutants, Sleepers, et UXA)

With the participation by HEAD’s students: Matteo Angelé, Cambier Anna, Aurora Avasilcai, Eli Bougeard, Steffie Chau, Nour Chraïbi, Rania Doudech, Milla Faivre, Amadeus Kapp, Lucie Landolt, Hugo Lemahieu, Clara Locherer, Luis Lopes Patrao, Mathilde Plé, Lou Pouwels Arts, Julie Richard, Noémy Rubio Meau, Téo Seven.”

The exhibition is curated by Branden W. Joseph (Frank Gallipoli Professor of Modern and Contemporary Art, Columbia University, New York), Elisabeth Jobin (curator at MAMCO) and HEAD – Genève students.

Inquiring minds want to know.

Instructions

WHAT IS CHROMATOSE?

Chromatose is an exquisite corpse novel about revolution.

It is written by a dozen people and illustrated by many more.

Each author writes in his or her own language (with perhaps an English translation) about the trials and tribulations of the main character who can morph into male or female, young or old, sick or healthy, smart or dumb, with as much minute detail as the author wishes to impart.

For example the protagonist can spend a page examining a flower or removing a bullet from his or her arm. Or walking a dog “before” any of “this” happened. Or explaining how she or he came to be a fighter, soldier, intellectual, truck driver, flag maker, farmer, marketing expert in the struggle to engage in the “revolution.”

There is no up or down or past or future or present or even void, but all of these things in this neural narrative mind twister. What is interesting is how the “revolution” finds itself – eventually – as one featuring a struggle within. But of course, it’s all the struggles without (the film noir and b/w silent horror of the world).

There we understand how the protagonist finally sees the world for what it is and isn’t and understands there’s another place where one can actually care for another person and be unafraid, fight the good fight and understand right from wrong. It’s not an easy trip and there are many trap doors.

Writers will be passed sections of the work over time and each session should result in a few pages. They do not have to be connected but they can be. That can be connected to what the writer has written in their first session, or continue the thoughts of the received narratives. There is no style guide, there is no sexual orientation guide. Or even a human or American theme.

It can be political thriller, comedy, tragedy, comic, romance, scientist biography, memoir, dada poem. The protagonist can be a dog, a cat, a fish, a cloud, Jesus, God, Zeus, a box of cereal on a grocery store shelf, an historical figure in a painting, a trashcan, Billie Eilish, even the dead James Joyce or Charles Bukowski.

What’s required is that the narrative roll forward and that the revolution is made apparent in its struggle to proceed.

•••

Chromatose Starter Kit

If you need a prompt, here are some starter stories from Matthew.

Boxes

Me? Where do I live? Now? Well, I’ve long lived in boxes, typically cardboard, sometimes the nice ones that at one time cradled refrigerators or gas ovens. Santa Monica Boulevard was one of my swankiest addresses, but I’ve also lived along Rue de Rivoli in Paris, France and Augustrasse in Berlin. For a while I camped out on Floral Street in Covent Garden London and for a year in the giant plaza in Mexico City – Plaza de la Constitución, El Zócalo. My favorite was the box I huddled in one winter under the Rialto in Venice. Sweet. Chilly, but nice. Now, I’m in Brooklyn. Court Street. Why not? I’m visiting some friends.

What? Oh. Sure. Well, the quality of cardboard was always best in Paris, or maybe it the capital vibe, the architecture, the Seine, the cheap bread. Plus during the day I had the pleasure of visiting the Manets in the Musée d’Orsay and the two Vermeers in the Louvre. The Astronomer (1668) is a favorite. So thrilling seeing the mind push out, gravitating upwards towards the cosmos. Sure that the late 17th century, people barely understood gravity. Most didn’t. Most actually still don’t.

But the box? Love the box. As a boy my brothers would shoo me into an open one, close the lid, tape it up and skedaddle. I didn’t care. I liked the darkness and liked what it planted in my little red headed skull.

Now? Now, I’m an orphan. Left alone, on this planet, nothing left to fight save tilting at windmills. No fight, no purpose, no process, no meaning. Revolution? What you mean like 1776?

You crazy? The Revolution is within; it is not without. Love? Well I have memories of course. We’re rivers; we’re not things, we’re processes, like rivers. The past... is it fixed? Who fucking who knows fucking who cares fucking.

Time a river? Sure, Johnny, just like in the song. A series of dull instants with a future next week on the television box.

’Conomy

Grifting gold molars from the graveyard, a currency in the ‘conomy where a chompe nugget is worth a meal or a pillow or a filament. We are and were after all, in the case that, where and when, were and are still, questionable ‘ordinates on the carta. But boots, amigos, are meals, are what we are after in the spaces that were and are left when those fuckers disembarked and and and, and and.

Lookin ‘a me to see if I couldn’t a shoned the light on the thing, but I couldn’t as my forces were spent like so many dimes on the arcade or on life or on the sweet whore of life; a silver round, fuck, well then what?

So here now, and in this stone and brick forest, I see a cardinal and blue jay minding their territories and arguing about the fuck.

Cubic squares of air. As if that matters, it doesn’t and never did and then all the body parts and now the pages of Newton and Bergson flying in the wind, hunting them all down for to make a fire because the last fuckers blew the fuses and the lights went out and it’s just me and my wolf, looking for canned heat.

Thanks the Lordy I have my mandolin. Music is my life. Thanks the Lordy I have a picture of my wife. Love is my struggle.

Thanks the Lordy I have teeth and need no dentist. I can still fucking chew.

Thanks the Lordy, here’s my story. An exquisite corpse.

Notions

“Please,” I said. “Let’s get this straight. There’s a problem and I’m telling you we need to fix the problem before it gets worse.”

“And?” she said. A lead. I took the bait, she reeled me in.

“And, people will get hurt, they’ll get hurt badly. They will die and we will all die. And no one will be around to bury you, us, not even the shovel we used to bury those in the before.”

“So what?” she challenged. She challenged me to care. I took the bait, she reeled me in. Again.

•••

We were paddling away from it. The fires, of course. The fires burning the useless computers, headphones, the cables, the Tupperware, rubber tires, the hard plastic garbage bins, even the bricks. The bricks which were now too hot to throw at the fascists. Someone sang a song. You could catch it on the water as if it were a stone skipping gently over the past two decades, touching down on each curl of a wave, the fish half dead wondering what the fuck was going on with the humans. The birds stayed away and configured themselves into curious punctuation marks, punching the air with their knowledge of flight and, not surprisingly, our ignorance of it.

Time Ago

We were surrounded like ants at a Thanksgiving spit of chewing gum. We were the gum. They were the ants. Caught off guard, stuck to the asphalt, just people like you all. Just plain old people. Then, going to school, learning things, writing things, building things like science projects out of glass jars and wires and batteries and cardboard. This is how it works. Science.

Truth, no? Plug it in, make it spin. Rules, gravity, again.

Electricity. Electric City. Belief. And some young scientists (though not me) went to church or synogogue or the mosque or took a walk in the woods to talk and pray to trees. Whatever it doesn’t matter. It was all okay. No one could stop you and no one wanted to stop you. Why would they? So we were surrounded. And it wasn’t the first time, but it was the first time we got out with our lives. My pants still have holes in them from the biting.

The separations started almost immediately.

Darknesses

The lights were taken away. The matches too. They had to control the fire and they set fire to everything we had and then the things they had so we couldn’t use them. Bicycles. Bats.

Radios so we couldn’t listen. Wrist watches so we couldn’t tell the time. And they took away the darkness too. Why do that? So we were only allowed to live in a blindness, a thickness of fog and damp that stank of naptha and mud, rotting dogs slaughtered for their teeth. We were left with gravity. Which, we knew, they could never take away from us.

So is this the story of the war without or the war within? My war? Our war? Our changes, our disintegration? Our redemption?

Chromotose: en médecine, pigmentation de la peau.

One dream returns night after night. I’m in my house talking with a friend and there’s a knock on the door. A tall man with glasses. He finds his way inside. Outside is his parked car, and a bed, all made up. I can see it from a window. I tell him to get in it and leave. But he won’t. I don’t understand. He won’t leave.

No matter what I do. I lift him up in the air and throw him down, rag doll, on the floor, break his glasses. He gets up, glasses repaired and continues to take over my house, now with two dogs on leashes.

I wake up angry. This is my life when I’m conscious. Angry. I find my way back to sleep and have another dream about a girl who is as tall as a tree and a soldier with frizzy hair. She shows me a passage in a letter I wrote about my first true love.

“Your first true love,” she says. “It was nearly 30 years ago.”

“Oh yes, I remember, terribly sad.”

She nods. “You gave this to me to read.” In the letter I wrote how broken I was. Part of the fixing was the writing of the letters.

Returning home the man is walking out of my house with his two dogs. I tell him I don’t want him in my house and I don’t want to hurt him. He pays me no mind. He’s already determined that he’s part of my home, now, and he’s not leaving. Ever.

“What’s the number for the police?” I ask a friend who suddenly turns into a black telephone, you know the kind you see in black and white detective films. Then, it starts to ring.

– MR

Here is one from me…

Dream

I was dreaming all night about the story - about relay, about handoff, about the revolution. I woke several times and sat on the edge of the bed trying to remember. I could not recall the details, or the plot, or even the idea exactly, only that it had something to do with branching trails and stories.

I went back to sleep and returned to the dream. I was planning things out again. It all seemed so clear, almost cinematic. Something was being passed from one character to another.

I saw four figures standing. One was a woman in a bikini, then a man in a suit, then a tall woman elegantly dressed, and then another man. They were clearly characters in the story.

I watched the branching trails unfold, the passing of one story into another. Then I woke again. I sat up. The dream flattened and turned featureless once more.

I went back to sleep wondering what it was they were passing to each other.

Back in the dream I showed something to myself in answer to the question.

Yes. It was a key.

They pass a key from one to the next. Each unlocks a door into their own story. At the end they lock another door behind them and pass the key along to the next.

Now here I am writing it down.

Is that a new story I will be starting?

I do not know. I am already in the middle of so many.

C.T.

A Collective Exquisite Corpse Novella (Texts & Images)

MATTHEW ROSE

Call for Writers and Artists – Contribute to CHROMATOSE

Hello there — writers, artists, visionaries: we invite you to take part in a potentially wild collaborative experiment.

CHROMATOSE is a surrealist exquisite corpse novella — a collective act of storytelling about revolution, desire, metamorphosis, and the desperate beauty of coming of age in chaotic times. Think of it as an unfolding dream stitched together from many minds, where each hand leaves its trace and no one knows quite where it leads.

The Project

Conceived by Trouble Magazine, CHROMATOSE extends our usual deep dives into art and culture into a long-form fiction — a fractured mirror held up to our gilded and gelded age. The story explores inner and outer revolutions, told through a protagonist who can become anyone or anything: young or old, human or not, divine or broken, blissfully lost or lucid to the bone.

Each contributor writes a short section (up to 1,000 words), continuing or twisting the story in any direction. There are no limits of style or genre — you might write a tragic monologue, a scientific memoir, a comic interlude, a lyric hallucination. The only rule: the narrative keeps moving forward, and the revolution — whatever that means to you — must pulse through it.

Visual artists are equally vital to the project. Submit analogue works only (drawing, painting, collage, photography — no AI), as 300 dpi JPGs in portrait format. Each image should be accompanied by one or two sentences that expand the narrative — think of it as a poetic caption advancing the story.

How to Participate

• Text: up to 1,000 words per submission, formatted as a “chapter.”

• Art: analogue only, 300 dpi JPG, portrait format (8 x 10 inches/ 20 x 25 cm). Include a short narrative cue.

• All contributors will be listed on a dedicated page.

• The finished work will be released as a free global PDF. Print copies will be available for sale; contributors receive digital editions.

• SEND TEXTS TO : MATTHEW.ROSE.PARIS at GMAIL dot COM

• SEND IMAGES TO : troublemagazine2025 at gmail dot COM

Collaboration

Collaboration is itself a form of revolt — an act of imagination against isolation and automation. CHROMATOSE invites you to help shape a living, breathing, ever-shifting story. If you’ve ever wanted to die on a hill for art, here’s the hill. Bring your fire.

WHAT IS CHROMATOSE?

CHROMATOSE is an exquisite corpse novella about revolution, written and drawn by dozens around the world. The “main character” is fluid — morphing between sexes, ages, bodies, and states of grace or decay. One writer may find them sewing a flag; another, dissecting a rose; another, fighting shadows in a war that might be real or remembered.

The protagonist is mercurial — transforming across submissions, through languages and sensibilities. They may be man or woman, saint or soldier, animal, cloud, god, or ghost — one moment dissecting a rose, the next removing a bullet, the next walking a dog before the world began to end. The world they move through folds and unfolds, as revolutions do: inward, outward, nowhere fixed.

There are no stylistic borders, no dictates of genre or morality. Tragedy may follow farce; a manifesto may melt into myth. What matters is motion — the narrative must proceed, however uncertainly, toward the restless promise of change.

There’s no single timeline or truth — just the recursive, collective dream of resistance and rebirth. Over time, the revolution reveals itself as both outward and inward: the struggle to fight the world, and the struggle to survive oneself.

Join us. Write a page. Paint a frame. Add your voice to the strange and beautiful rebellion of CHROMATOSE.

Please feel free to comment, ask questions, raise issues, protest, the whole shebang.

MATTHEW ROSE / EDITOR & PUBLISHER TROUBLE, The occasional quarterly art magazine, mostly about trouble.

JAMIE NEWTON / MANAGING EDITOR & DESIGNER TROUBLE

Random Orbit

Sitting Around Talking About Art Supplies

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a month ago · 11 likes · 8 comments · Brian Biggs

Check out Brian Biggs new series on art supplies on Random Orbit

A Google Alert, a Poet, and a Found Poem

A small and curious event occurred yesterday.

Some time ago, the poet/painter Richard Siken had his publisher acquire the rights to one of my paintings for the endpapers of his new book of prose poems, I Do Know Some Things, published by Copper Canyon Press.

The book is available here:
https://www.coppercanyonpress.org/books/i-do-know-some-things-by-richard-siken/

Yesterday, I received a Google alert for the term “cecil touchon.” This happens from time to time. Usually it is something archival, occasionally something unexpected. I followed the link to a review of Siken’s new book published at Public Seminar:

https://publicseminar.org/2026/02/review-richard-siken-i-do-know-some-things/

As is my habit, I began collecting phrases. Not from the poems themselves, but from the surrounding text: the review, the framing language, the contextual commentary. I do this almost automatically. It is a reflex born of collage practice. When language gathers in one place, I begin to see it as material.

I was not reading for argument.
I was not reading for agreement.
I was reading for charge.

So I pulled lines indiscriminately, without concern for authorship, tone, or attribution. A phrase here. A fragment there. Something that vibrated. Something that leaned toward another fragment across the page.

What emerged was not a summary of Siken’s book. It was not an interpretation. It was not even, strictly speaking, about him.

It was a found poem made from the atmosphere around the book.

This is something I have done for decades with printed matter: catalogs, newspapers, theoretical essays, exhibition statements, instruction manuals. I do not approach text as sacred territory but as a field. The field has currents. I move through them and gather what adheres.

There is a peculiar pleasure in encountering a poet I did not previously know through the peripheral language that surrounds his work. It is like meeting someone first by overhearing the conversations about them in another room. You form an impression from the echoes.

Originally the above was the proposed cover design using Post Dogmatist Painting #934 - 2017 - 60 x 48 inches - acrylic over paper on canvas but I told them they could use the image any way they wished for this UK edition of the book. They ended up deciding on using the image as the endcovers inside the book which I think is a lovely idea.

If you read the article you will see that this book comes in the aftermath of a debilitating stroke.

here is the paragraph that triggered the google alert:

“This attention to the visual is continued in the design of the new collection, which has a textured cover that feels soft to the touch, with the title scrawled on in a handwritten typeface. The tomato-red and eggshell-colored endpapers of artist Cecil Touchon’s “Typographic Abstractions” paintings are striking against the matte black cover. The painted collages of upside-down, layered lettering are a nod to Siken’s breakdown of language after the stroke.”

There is something quietly satisfying about this small chain of events.

A painter/poet I did not know uses one of my paintings in his book.
A review of that book triggers a Google alert.
The alert leads me to harvest language from the review.
The harvested language becomes a poem.

The work circulates.
The field recombines.

Nothing was planned.
Everything was available.

This is how collage thinks.

And perhaps this is also how poetry thinks.

Below is the poem that emerged from that exploration.

It may contain phrases written by Siken himself. It may not. I did not discriminate. I was collecting lines the way one gathers scraps for a collage - guided by rhythm, friction, and adjacency rather than citation.

Here is the collage poem.

swept clean of habit
I had forgotten the regular things
seduced by the lush desert.
looming presence cemented the feeling.
I would dwell endlessly
the idea that the only goal
allows for cognitive transformation.
images of circling, dredging, and burying,
I circled new darknesses
with a harrowing purpose.
the dizzying descriptive wanderlust
all the way to the end.
things we circle around,
things that keep us up at night.
the last thing on your mind,
a way back to language,
its proximities to death.
They grind against each other:
Then, he died. Then she did.
cascade in fragments.

What strikes me in this poem is the movement from seduction to mortality, from lushness to fragmentation. It begins with a clearing - “swept clean of habit” - as if ordinary consciousness has been stripped away. The “lush desert” suggests a paradoxical abundance inside apparent desolation, a space where familiar structures dissolve and something more elemental takes hold. From there, the poem circles downward. Circling, dredging, burying - these are motions of excavation and obsession. We orbit what unsettles us. We return to it. We circle again.

Midway through, the poem shifts from the solitary “I” to a shared “we,” widening the field. What begins as personal disorientation becomes collective human condition: the things we circle around are the things that keep us awake. The final turn brings language into proximity with death. The blunt sequence, “Then, he died. Then she did,” strips away metaphor and leaves only succession and loss. The poem collapses into fragments, as if acknowledging that when we approach what is most real - mortality, absence, the end of things - language can only cascade and break apart. What remains is not resolution but a charged awareness of how thought, desire, and death grind against each other.

The poem is the result of phrases I was attracted to but over all it seems to capture something of Siken’s journey. I am in the high desert of Albuquerque, NM and Siken lives down the road in the same desert further west in Tucson AZ. In the great southwest that’s called neighbors.

Berlin & London

Berlin : 4th - 10th May 2026
London : 15th - 21st June 2026

Following the success of the London Collage Project and the L.A. Collage Expedition in 2025, we’re thrilled to announce two brand-new dates and locations for our Contemporary Collage Magazine residencies:

The London and Berlin Collage Expeditions!

Created to help you deepen and expand your collage practice, both weeks will be filled with inspiration, group discussions, peer to peer critiques and the opportunity to explore new practices with in your collage.

SIGN ME UP!

What to expect…

On each of our collage expeditions there is only one rule – you must source all of your collage materials in the host city.

After that, you can expect a week packed with creativity, conversation, coaching and great company, culminating in a one-day pop-up exhibition to display the works you’ve created during the week. You’ll be sharing the open-plan studio with fellow collage artists and have the opportunity to push your collage practice in new directions.

Each week is hosted by Les Jones (Founder of Contemporary Collage Magazine) and Cecil Touchon (Renowned collage artist). We will also be announcing a special guest host for our Berlin Week.

Cost : £1080

This covers your week at the residency, it does not cover food, accommodation or travel.

Locations

London : 15th – 21st June 2026
Indra Studios, Hackney Wick, London

Berlin : 04th – 10th May 2026
Prinzessinnenstudio, Berlin

Feedback from previous residencies…

“I found the whole experience exhilarating. Working alongside like-minded, extraordinary artists who generously shared technical approaches and ideas was energising and inspiring. Our work space was like a field of wildflowers with dazzling collages constantly blooming around the room. I will always remember the atmosphere of camaraderie, the good humour and the endless creativity we shared that week in London.”

Steve Snider

“For me, the residency became a chance to shake things up, to step outside of my comfort zone, and to embrace the act of creating fully in the moment. I left London inspired, grateful, and ready for what comes next.”

Deborah Danelley

“I learned that having limited materials rather than a full studio of paper focused my attention and stimulated my creativity. It cemented for me that I have a voice and that my voice works!”

Clare Schmehl

FIND OUT MORE AND APPLY

Have a great day!
Les & Cecil

Contemporary Collage Magazine, Suite 1, Silk Mill House, Newcastle-under-Lyme, United Kingdom

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A supposed collector sent me an email asking about how to acquire my work so I put a list of places together for him. Thought I would share it with you. If you are in any of these cities stop in and check it out.

Where to See My Work

Online - Artsy.net

Nuart Gallery - Santa Fe and Los Angeles

https://www.nuartgallery.com/artists/39-cecil-touchon/

Sears Peyton Gallery - New York and Los Angeles
https://www.searspeyton.com/artist/Cecil_Touchon/works/list/

Kelsey Michaels Fine Art - Laguna Beach
https://www.kelseymichaelsfineart.com/#/cecil-touchon-1/

Ferrari Gallery - Dallas
https://www.ferrarigallery.net/artists/ceciltouchon

Laura Rathe Fine Art - Houston

https://laurarathe.com/artist/cecil-touchon

JF Gallery - West Palm Beach
https://jfgallery.com/collections/cecil-touchon

Ann Connelly Fine Art - Baton Rouge
https://www.annconnelly.com/artist/cecil-touchon

Some Assembly Required

For all of you collage and assemblage artists out there, if you don’t know about it, you should spend some time -maybe a long time - checking sound collage artists on this great podcast. Incredible for background studio music while you are working.

Buried deep in there someplace is some of my own audio collage works featured as well from back in the days when I was messing around with audio collage, field recordings and microsound.org. Digital audio was still pretty primitive back in those days compared to now but revolutionary at the time.

When I was doing that, probably 2000 - 2010ish I eventually had to put it behind me because I would get so absorbed in it that it was having a negative effect on the rest of my life outside of the headphones. Not that I ever made that much work. Maybe one album’s worth. It all remained in sketchbook form.

I was calling these Massurrealist Meditations. a lot of them are from 2001 - 2003, Below is Massurrealist Meditation #5 as a sample. Some are very meditative and some pretty wild with differents sorts of emotional feeling. I think these were all a response to the environment post 9/11, 2001 and the madness that followed.
We were living in Cuernavaca, Mexico at that time and had brought up an exhibition of work for my Fort Worth, Texas gallery - William Campbell Contemporary Art and were in Fort Worth at the time of the event. On the morning of 9/11 we were at a hotel and my dealer called me to turn on the TV. The first plane had already hit the first tower and then as we watched the second one hit.

Then the borders were closed and we couldn’t get back to Cuernavaca nor did we have the funds to wait it out so we stayed at a relative’s house for a couple of weeks until we could get back home.

Anyway, this post is to point you to the following…

"Some Assembly Required" is a pioneering U.S. sound collage radio show and podcast, hosted by Jon Nelson, that features mashups, audio art, and experimental music, using found sounds and samples to create new compositions, a style that's both musical and avant-garde, celebrating the art of collage in audio form. The term also relates to broader collage art, with exhibitions and music inspired by combining disparate elements, from visual art to the experimental music of artists like Brian Eno and DJ Shadow.

Key Aspects of Some Assembly Required Music

• Genre: Sound collage, mashup, audio art, experimental music, sampling.

• Style: Combines diverse audio sources—instructional records, pop music, field recordings—into new, often humorous or thought-provoking, musical pieces.

• Artists: Features creators like DJ Shadow, Wax Audio, The Tape-beatles, and others who work with found sounds and creative sampling.

• Focus: Explores themes of memory, nostalgia, and specific states of mind through sound, often with a strong cultural commentary.

Where to Find It

• Podcast: You can find episodes and playlists on the official Some Assembly Required website and through platforms like Mn Artists/Walker Art Center.

• Compilations: Look for digital releases featuring sound collage miniatures from the show, like the “50/50 Compilation”.

• At one point Jon sent me the entire program to that point in CD form for the archives which are stored here.

Something different? Listen to an eclectic and surprising mix broadcasting from Silver City, New Mexico by maestro Rod Stasick. A composer and sound artist who works with various media and techniques, such as field recordings, EMF sounds, graphic signs, symbols, and random numbers.
His interest is in creating event-systems for different situations and exploring
the connections between sound, image, text, and information.

Rod Stasick’s Random Radio

Freeform music, Wednesday night from 8-10 MST
on Gila/Mimbres Community Radio, KURU 89.1 FM
in Silver City, NM and online at KURU891.org.
Support Community Radio!

Subscribe on substack to hear the weekly show!

New Publication: ‘co/ordinates’ : Federico Federici

misreading asemic writing as kitsch:
scientific forms and structural depth;
ten olivetti tables;
first study about farfalla;
first study across silence;
warten auf god;
rooks, knights (and other probabilities);
negotiating authorship in the age of AI;
[ controlled ] generative drift;
two letter excerpts (and a recast);
cracking the algorithm;
being an event;
authorship as spectral reduction;
stanzas I-III;
consciousness as a state of language;
hypothesis on a practice of operative writing;
short abstract in computational algebra;
instructions without a manual;
translanguaging in asemic writing:
a metric space approach |

buy on amazon

Subscribe on SUBSTACK to receive free excerpts from White Noise directly in your inbox.

WHITE NOISE - Federico Federici

By WHITE NOISE Federico Federici

The new issue of trouble is out! Download and/or buy the hardcopy today!

trouble is a magazine
it appears three to four times a year
it’s mostly about trouble

trouble / volume three / number two

writing by: john himmelfarb, cecil touchon, jody jenkins, matthew rose and larry jaffee

art by: allan bealy, keryn fountain, susanne junker, caterina verde, roger peet, glenn burney, alexander limarev, william evertson, cindy hwang, roger brouard, bibiana padilla maltos, c. mehrl bennett, e.y. reilly, christopher peterson, cory peeke, helena ernst, gertraud platschek, lawrence charles miller, jon whittier, hilary kacser, herman james, emma bourgin & alison grace koehler, kr windsor, brooke newberry, lou beach, robin croft, kerry davis & anna daedalus, dh dowling, reid wood, ria vanden eynde, roberta aylward, kate solow, keith donovan, robin tewes, michael thompson, willie marlow, scott froschauer, susanna lakner, nancy goodman lawrence, norman sherfield, milanka bunard, stacy bergener, jamie newton, rosaire appel, maridel allinder, suzanna scott, sarah de teliga, kathleen mazzocco, david malinowski, shelle barron, fred free, dear anushka, lene de montaigu, julie anne rohrer, jennifer allen newton, kevin sampsell, molly rogers, pau lopez vila, matthew rose

poetry by: alexandra oliver, melanie cole, mandy morrison, mark fountain, jon whittier, alexandra ernst, carol singleton, chloe finch, garret siegel

download the PDF.

order the hardcopy.

Happy New Year Everyone!

I am not going to talk about the state of the world, what has been happening in the past or about to happen in 2026. There is plenty of news about that everywhere. The first thing I want to say is I have been pretty happy with how I have been doing on a personal level.

I have taken up getting out of the studio and going on trips during 2025. I have been to the UK twice, Thailand once, Saint Louis, MO twice to see family, Dallas/Fort Worth to see my daughter and grandson Henry who turns 6 this week. Los Angeles at least twice. Had a show in Los Angeles in April, gave three collage workshops, two of them with Les Jones and maybe there is other stuff but if there is it slips my mind at the moment.

I am a homebody by nature. I am perfectly happy staying in the studio and working along on my projects.

I kept my personal promise to myself of walking ten thousand steps a day on average for the entire year of 2025. I ended up at 10,145 steps a day for the whole year! Fireworks and sparklers! I can’t believe I honored that goal. That is probably the first new years resolution I ever accomplished or even remembered to work on. Well, now that I think about it, I did make a commitment to writing something in my journal every day in mid 2022. I accomplished that and kept on going. Now writing everyday is just normal. And I am writing a lot.

One thing I have figured out about writing is that you can let your imagination go wild at no extra cost! Wait a minute, I guess it is time to crack open a new word document and start my 2026 journal… There, done.

This week I am starting to get serious about organizing the Creative Lifestyle writings into first draft book manuscripts and starting the process of revision and editing. That is coming along well.

Studio production slipped substantially this year with all of the traveling and writing. But I wasn’t being pushed by the market which was very slow by comparison to previous years so, with plenty of inventory, I have given myself the time to work on other things of interest for a while.

I really appreciate all of you sticking with me on the Touchonian. I am glad there are all of you out there to share my thoughts with and tolerating all of the other crazy stuff I write. But I am having fun. There are now more than 625 free access posts on the Touchonian. Assuming you have been enjoying it, Consider becoming a paid subscriber to help me justify my madness.

Subscribe now

And don’t forget the Hole Company! That is slowly brewing into a book in the background.

OK. Today is Sunday morning December 7. The show continues starting at 10:00am to 4:00pm and then that will be a wrap. The week went by like a blur. I unfortunately was trying out substack live and am not too happy with how that went. I’ll have to work on that. The phone mike didn’t pick up most of the sound and it was kind of choppy and I am not a very good cameraman obviously. I learned that substack only likes the camera in portrait orientation and I’ll have to rethink the sound part.

Anyway, it was a great week and we made a lot of art. I’ll walk around and take an inventory a minute… looks like about 150+ works by 15 of us in 4.5 days making due with whatever we hunted and gathered around DTLA.

Zach and I will be heading to Thailand tomorrow morning. I’ll try to check out there for a future collage expedition.

I will attempt to continue posting along the trail from the beaches in Thailand.

Here are the instagrams of our expeditionary team. Be sure to follow everybody.

@ClareSchmehl @mizRobin @DeniseEmanuelClemen @CarolyneOliverArt @RodneyBoone96 @JuliaWalck @thecreativecalico @denverjennifer @cyeeeece @decorativedebris @InesKramerArt @⁨CecilTouchon⁩ @LesJonesCollage @gnmooreca @Karen.Hirsch.18

Fly, drive run or walk to join us Sunday at 810 E. 3rd Street in Los Angeles for our globally awaited pop up exhibition to see our contemporary urban archeological report on Los Angeles containing a hundred plus works of collage by 15 of the BIGGEST NAMES in the world of collage art.

We are working feverishly hunting, gathering, collecting, chopping, composing and gluing, paper artifacts from the city into soon to be highly sought after works of art. Don’t miss your chance to rub elbows with the artists in person. We are expecting a star-studded crowd with LA’s most renowned, high society, exclusive, insider art afficionados, cognoscenti and connoisseurs. Dress to the Nines.

Don’t worry! Everybody welcome even if you come as you are.

B.Y.O.B.
(bring your own brain)

First report.

Today is Monday morning. On this past Friday November 28th. I drove out to Los Angeles from Albuquerque, New Mexico carrying art works for my gallery dealer to the Los Angeles location at Bergamot Station. It was a 12 hour drive. I arrived at my son, Zach’s last night at the place he had been living the last 4 months.

On Saturday I delivered the art to Nuart Gallery and hung out at the gallery for the morning and afternoon until Les and Mandy arrived from London. I picked up Zach and we headed downtown to our new digs for the week and had dinner with Les and Mandy in a nearby restaurant.

On Sunday we met up with Graham Moore who took us to the art store and for a bit of scavenging for street posters.

In the evening we set up the studio space and met with early arrivals at a nearby brewery. These included Rodney, Julia and her hubby Jackson and Claire who had been at the London Expedition earlier in the year.

Now we will be heading over to finish the preparations for today’s start.