—–> Sunday, August 11th, 2013 @ 8:00pm
**will also be on view during opening hours through August 31st**
DICK: An Oblique Kennedy Conspiracy Countdown
by Sam Truitts
179-120 of 365 transmissions
(26.May – 26.July, 2013)
This montage of sound, language and moving images is an excerpt from a yearlong AV interpretation of a book called DICK (appearing in November 2013), a prose poem grounded in proprietary knowledge about President Kennedy’s assassination. The pith of that information is transmitted through Morse Code, the seemingly undifferentiated plane of which is broken up with stage directions from Shakespeare’s tragedies. Dick to that extent is a cryptogram containing information of inherent value burrowed within layers of cipher. In the nature of this book, its sealed condition serves various functions, including the mimicking of the secrecy that surrounds acts undertaken in our name by our government and its official and unofficial outlying agencies.
Each of the daily AV transmissions deals with 140 “words” (or including the Morse code) of the text. It begun on 22.Nov,12 and will end on 22.Nov.13.
Dick’s back-story lies in my family’s association with Kennedy’s assassination. My mother, the late visual artist Anne Truitt, was a close friend of Mary Pinchot Meyer, a former journalist, artist and the ex-wife of Cord Meyer, a founder of the World Federalist Movement and subsequently a CIA official. Mary Meyer had an on-going affair with President Kennedy up to his death, about which she wrote in a diary. On our family leaving Washington for Tokyo in 1963 (my father, a journalist, had been appointed bureau chief of Newsweekin Japan), Mary Meyer told my mother that if anything happened to her she should find and safeguard the diary. Meyer was assassinated in Washington in October 1964, and on this news my mother contacted James Angleton, then head of the CIA’s Counterintelligence Staff and a family friend, to secure it. He did so in his office safe. Subsequently the diary was given to my mother and to Mary Meyer’s sister, Antoinette Pinchot Bradlee. They read and then burned it. One reason why Mary Meyer is likely to have been killed, according to my mother, was that she had begun to talk about the JFK assassination, relaying that she had and was collecting information regarding its perpetrators. My mother passed on this information to her children, which I in turn now obliquely relay.
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Sam Truitt was born in Washington, DC, and raised there and in Tokyo, Japan. He has studied and holds degrees from Kenyon College, Brown University, and the State University of New York. He is the author of five books of poetry and been the recipient of the 2010 Howard Fellowship, two Fund for Poetry grants and the 2002 Contemporary Poetry Award from the University of Georgia. His works in digital language arts include “transverse,” “shaft/state state/shaft,” “Days” and “Dick: An Oblique Kennedy Conspiracy Countdown,” an audio-visual interpretation of Dick. Sam Truitt has worked as a stagehand, audio technician, private investigator, carpenter, teacher and is currently a guest lecturer at Bard College and the Executive Director of Station Hill of Barrytown in the Hudson Valley, where he lives with his wife and daughters.
For more, including links to other works: samtruitt.org
Photos from event:
