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BORDER LORD
by Dave Hickey

"Anything is immoral that consoles, stimulates of confirms a distortion. Anything that acts in place of the natural will to live is immoral. All cheap amusement becomes at a maturity, immoral -- the heroin of the soul.
Scott Fitzgerald, In His Own Time

"Evolution...is obviously not some process of drowning beings clutching at straws and climbing from suffering and travail and virtual extinction to tenous momentary survival. Rather, evolution has been a matter of days well-lived, chameleon strength, energy, zappy sex, sunshine stored up, inventiveness, competitiveness, and the whole fun of busy brain cells."
Edward Hoagland, Red Wolves and Black Bears

That an artist like Mel Casas would make the transgression of observable borders and the articulation on invisible ones the business of his art [[strikethrough]] , [[/strikethrough]] should come as no surprise to anyone. One might say (although one would be wrong) that he could hardly have done otherwise, having been born on one border in El Paso, and wounded fighting for anothe rin Korea, educated on one side of a border in Mexico to paint and teach on the other side in the United States, all the while participating in the culture and language of both -- or all three if you count the Oriental culture [[strikethrough]] that [[/strikethrough]] he was exposed to during the Korean war and which still occupies a good deal of his interest and attention. 
The general relevance of [[strikethrough]] Mel [[/strikethrough]]Casas' endeavor, however, arises from the less often acknowledged fact that, in the late 20th [[strikethrough]] twentieth [[/strikethrough]] century, like it or not, we all live on the border, on a multi-plicity of borders, in fact, and the problems of identity that [[strikethrough]] which [[/strikethrough]] are so theatrically self-evident in Mel Casas' experience, exacer-bated as they are by the confluence of culture and language, are
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