Jacob Yeates

Physical copy for scale.

A committee, a task force, rational actors all: Senator Thomas, Judge Thomas, Congressman Thomas, Lieutenant Thomas, Citizen Thomas. Finger to fingers to wrists to elbows to shoulders: vetted augurs to determine if verifiable truths and sacred data can be plucked from the still-sopping/sobbing viscera they forever spread across the chamber. They have to be sure. They will bury faces in these bubbling necks and breathe deep. They will wear these bodies like Lasansky coats.

And once howls have turned to gore has turned to rot has turned to dust on collective hands and collective hands are old or lonely enough to fear a deathbed or second-guess a legacy the remaining pelts can be gathered from floors and closets and holes and drainage ditches. They can be scraped clean, cured, and splayed out on the grid, and the didactics can absolve all of those in need of a good night's sleep.

Table of Contents:
Intro: U.S. Pantheon
Part One: Watching a Five Time Oscar Nominee After Fifteen More Years of U.S. Backed Apartheid
Part Two: Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: A Historic Primer
Part Three: Jeep Rubicon [50/49 B.C.]
Outro: Augustus of Prima Porta

Intro: U.S. Pantheon

Into that age of lesser metal burst ever sort of crime. Shame and truth and faithfulness fled, their places taken by frauds and plots and treachery and violence and a shameless lust for having.

The iron race raised sails to winds which the sailor had never before known; keels which previously had been trees standing on high mountains now danced in unexplored waves. The earth which before had been held in common like the light of the sun and the breezes, was now laid out in long tracts by the careful surveyor.

Men made further demands on the earth, not for crops and needful sustenance this time but to burrow into her bowels. The riches she’d hidden in the Stygian darkness were dug out, incitements to evil. Harmful iron and gold more harmful than iron came to the fore. War arose, fed by both, and rattled weapons in its bloody hand.

Men live by rapine. Neither is the guest safe from his host nor is the father-in-law safe from his son-in-law; friendship between brothers is rare. The husband threatens death to his wife and she to her husband; horrible mothers-in-law grind pallid aconite, and the son plans an early end to his father’s life.

Who doesn’t love a classic Original Sin narrative? After all, seems reasonably accurate to say, with the exception of the “impossibly” naive, cynical, and/or wealth —scare quotes because in each case it turns out it’s not impossible, it just should be — that anyone with any ties to any sort of imperial legacy, incidental or intentional benefactors and victims alike, probably recognizes there appears to be something fundamentally wrong with the way the world seems to shake out for a lot of folks.

According to Hesiod, Pandora opens her jar in the Golden Age, which sets the stage for degeneration into Silver, Bronze, Heroic, and then, contemporary to Hesiod, Iron. Turn over the postcard and read Ovid’s take on said Iron Age: you don’t have to be a hack analyst to find some pretty uncomfortable parallels between Empire’s “Then” and Empire’s “Now.”

For the time being, we’ll glaze over Hesiod’s point that Pandora’s creation, as the first woman, was a punishment for men in of itself, regardless of her namesake jar. Patriarchal scapegoating aside, as far as I’m concerned the real sauce is the relief that comes with an origin story that allows for the fundamental failures of creators in the first place. The Greek pantheon are, by their poets and orators own admissions, a squabbling collection of outlandishly powerful, fickle, and petty schemers, murderers, gadflies and rapists who would eat their children as soon as look at them (and, more than once, do). If these entities are the source of all creation, is it any wonder things shake out like they do? I wish my nation at least had the decency to craft a Founding Father mythos into something that provides some sort of explanation for a failed state. Oh, you mean this place was made by a collection of aristocratic slavers, socialites, weirdos and ghouls? Now this makes sense.

Watching a Five Time Oscar Nominee After Fifteen More Years of U.S. Backed Apartheid

These men could be the fathers of our five-year-old selves — woken up, shuffling through unlit halls to deliver glasses of water, sloping bodies in cotton shorts, rubbing eyes, goosebumps on hairy arms, legs and feet. These men could be our lovers — we watch their half-dressed shapes from our beds, from our chairs, from our kitchen counters.

We love these bodies and their vulnerability. We love these men.

This is convenient.

This is convenient — after all, who has not had this dream? Near-naked — but then, what’s a tee and underwear provide in this situation if not further embarrassment? One of my earliest memories: in school using the bathroom when two other boys push the door force the door open the door and they scream with laughter. Here near-naked is naked — naked in the mall, naked in school, naked in the parking lot, terrified and terrorized.

This is convenient in that so much fo what is done to these men who we could love and have loved is so true: Home invasion with masks and automatic weapons and words we do not understand and demands we cannot possibly meet.

We want this knife stabbed through that forehead again and again. It is a horrifying thing, but 25:20 is the closest thing to triumph that will be experienced in our homes before we lose all control, so stab this knife through that forehead.

Empire consistently succeeds in that its highly effective methods of highly aggressive reproduction are only paralleled by its ability to reconfigure language and imagination. Individuals, groups and systems deemed incompatible with its MOs are so often rendered impossible by all the ugly ways so many people designated as impossible have become personally acquainted with. And once so many impossibilities have been made, what other solutions to the ills of Empire can there be other than greater Empire? Think a sort of semiotic, linguistic hobbling. Think a mutilation. How could there ever be anything before Empire?



Describe a color that does not exist. Describe a color that can never exist. Other possibilities, they are not recognizable.

And sensationalized analogies do nothing if not prove their own points via their implicit failures of imagination. After all, what parts of a tongue have been lopped off, what areas have been trepanned and lobotomized — ideally done at birth or early adolescence to mitigate the trauma of it — so that an institution of harm can only be recognized with the assistance of monstrous precedent, viewed through the lenses of failed-but-nevertheless-attempted genocides, indexes of involuntary surgeries, of limbs, of blankets and bulldozers?

Stab this knife through that forehead. It is a horrifying thing, but we are led to believe 25:20 is the closest thing to triumph that will be experienced in what we are led to believe are our homes before we lose all control, so stab this knife through that forehead. It is a fictional thing.

It is true Yossef Romano wounded one of this captors with a kitchen knife before being shot multiple times and castrated — possibly before death, hopefully after — but what we see, clenched fingers, the bunched muscles of a forearm slamming this knife through that forehead, balaclava-clad head lolling, gun dropped, hands spasming, surely this captor, not all of them, but at least this one, is sad, it is a horrifying thing, but it is a moment of defiance, a kindness granted to an individual and an audience who want to die with dignity.

This is convenient, this horrifying, fictional thing serving as the only moment of dignity when forced against an overwhelming tide of impossible demands and never-ending violence. This is convenient, that the stakes are framed in terms of sudden domestic violation and spectacular deaths by TT-30s, AKMs and eventually exploding helicopters, because were a film to run for just under a century audiences may be forced to contend with the inevitable moments of humiliation accompanying inhabiting a world that slowly shrinks and not living as a person but existing as a refugee to contend with other nations requiring those distinctions via state policies of pity, disgust, exploitation or rage.

This is convenient, because of course we are in the hotel, the apartment, the house. We are not combatants. We are hopeful. We have negotiated land deals and mineral rights. We hope to do so again. We own these things, and if not now, we expect to soon.

Stab this knife through that forehead.

What other options remain? How would we ever placate these strange, violent men, their guns, their masks, their lack of subtitles?

Stab that knife through this forehead, and this forehead, and these foreheads.

Tomb of the Unknown Soldier: A Historic Primer

“In December 1920, New York congressman and World War I veteran Hamilton Fish Jr. proposed legislation that provided for the interment of one unknown American soldier at a special tomb to be built in Arlington National Cemetery. The purposes of the legislation was ‘to bring home the body of an unknown American warrior who in himself represents no section, creed, or race in the late war and who typifies, moreover, the soul of American and the supreme sacrifice of her heroic dead.’”

“Congressman Hamilton Fish, who in 1920 proposed the legislation to create the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier, said, ‘It is hoped that the grave of the unidentified warrior will become a shrine of patriotism for all the ages to come, which will be a source of inspiration, reverence and love of country for future generations.’”

So says the official website of the United States Office of National Cemeteries. Say what you will about the rest of the State’s collective memories, one can always rely on them to provide a concise historical description; no frills. The entry for the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier in the Arlington National Cemetery (Virginia) is no exception.

But what did Fish say in 1920? Something about “a source of inspiration, reverence and love of country for future generations”? Let’s get into that. These are felt emotions, of course, but verbs as well: actions. Believing this to be the function of the Tomb, what is required for this to take place? Ostensibly to love something is to know it — know it deeply — and act in accordance with this knowledge. To attend to all the histories and nuances of a subject with an intention that can only come from intimacy. The same can be said for reverence. What gives weight to an entity, abstract or concrete, if not a comprehensive understanding of it?

The four wars of the Tomb touches on, WWI, WWII, Korea and Vietnam, how are they known to us? What is normative U.S. canon for World War One? The “Big One”; a bit of a wash in which we were the good guys helping out some other good guys (the British? The French? Both?) Fight some misguided or outright bad guys (the Germans?) — enough time has gone on that even our State narrative has conceded things were all around pretty distasteful: somewhere around twenty million killed, and that number again in the maimed/traumatized category; supposed to end all wars but, you know, whoops.

Word War Two: Definitely more initial moral high ground from the European standpoint, no question, but by the time things were all said and done, the U.S. really clings to the end of Hitler rather than our own concentration, sorry, “internment,” camps, pardoning war criminals to swap military tech like baseball cards, and dropping the only two nuclear weapons to ever be used in wartime history on two major metropolitan areas, killing an un upwards of two hundred thousand human beings, the majority of them noncombatants. Those things don’t shine as brightly.

The Korean War: When remembered, if ever, often seen as the antiCommunist precursor for Vietnam, even less remembered as the time General Douglas MacArthur requested 34 atomic bombs to drop on the country, and even after being denied that approach, the U.S. still killed an estimated twenty percent of North Korea’s entire population and destroyed almost every city via nonstop bombing runs.

Vietnam: Frequently billed as wrong but “for the right reasons.” If not for those pesky Pentagon Papers we might still think defoliation, carpet bombing, burning down villages, free-fire zones and a draft were for the good of the Vietnamese, and not to prop up an unpopular, but U.S. friendly, puppet regime.

So maybe the conflicts the memorial is associated with don’t look so great in that light. But a monument tells us what to remember, its form, placement and attending rituals tell us how to do so. Since April 6, 1948 in half hour and hour shifts, the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier has been guarded 24 hours a day, 365 days a week, by a single “Tomb Sentinel,” who marches 21 steps back and forth in front of the Tomb until relieved by a commanding officer and new guard’s arrival. These individuals are pulled from the oldest active Army Regiment — the 3rd U.S. Infantry Regiment, known as “The Old Guard.” As the visible custodians of this place, mascots as well as guards, maybe we’re missing something, maybe this is where the reverence and love can come from. What are their histories?

The regiment in question, has been part of the United States military for just shy of two and a half centuries. From 1784 to 1865 the 3rd Infantry were involved in the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous Americans of the Miami, Seminole, Navajo and Chippewa tribes. In 1846 following the United States’ invasion of Mexican territory, despite the privately-held belief of Ethan Allen Hitchcock (one of the regiment’s lieutenant colonels) that “we have not one particle of right to be here,” the 3rd Infantry participated in the assaults and occupations of Palo Alto, Monterey, Vera Cruz, Cerro Gordo, Churubusco, Chapultepec, and Mexico City — a conflict characterized by not infrequent shelling of civilians, and widespread looting, murder and rape perpetrated by occupying U.S. forces. This was later described by Ulysses S. Grant (also serving as lieutenant at the time of the invasion) as “[never] a more wicked war than that waged by the United States on Mexico…one of the most unjust ever waged by a stronger nation against a weaker nation.”

Following their 1898 service in the Spanish-American War, ostensibly waged to free Cuba, Guam, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines from the tyranny of the Spanish Empire, the 3rd infantry would return to the Philippines in 1899, and for the next three years would be in the “n*gger fighting business,” to quote an enlistee, repressing Filipino struggles for the same autonomy promised to them one year earlier. After limited combat deployments during World War I and World War II, in 1966 the 3rd returned to their roots and were deployed to assist in the United Stats’ invasion of Vietnam up until 1970, since made famous by its free-fire zone policies, justified by senior leadership not he grounds “the Oriental doesn’t put the same high price on life as the Westerner.” Some of their members earning the particularly dubious honor of participating in the March 16, 1968 massacres of So’n My village, colloquially known by the U.S. as My Lai and My The, in which soldiers carried out orders to kill anything “walking, crawling, or growling.”

In our more recent memories, closer to direct experiences at this point, battalions from the 3rd have been deployed as support in operations in both Afghanistan and Iraq, places where it’s now easier to forget that we haven’t always been there rather than not remembering we had been there at all. Lord knows they won’t forget. After twenty years of U.S. occupation and more than slightly frequent drone murders coloring their lives, Afghanistan gets even more exciting after the twenty seconds it takes for the Taliban to seize everything. Iraq, invaded under false pretenses even from the beginning, smolders with civilian deaths eclipsing two hundred thousand, with thousands more tortured with U.S. backed methods, cities bombed to pieces, and national assets seized and purchased by private companies.

So these are some of the pieces. Some previously Unknown dynamics and quantities made Known.

Are we inspired? Are we reverent? And love?

Appendix, i.e. Stats!



Originally a three level tomb containing an unidentified American soldier from First World War France in 1921, expanded in 1931 with a sarcophagus-marker design by New York architect Lorimer Rich; at its longest point, fourteen feet, ten point four inches, at its widest, nine feet endpoint two inches, and a collective hundred tons (and some change); three carved wreaths on the marker’s north and south sides (38 leaves, 12 berries each, every wreath corresponding with a particular World War One battle), east side featuring three allegorical figures of Peace, Victory and Valor (originally Valor was “American Manhood”), and its west with the legend “Here rests in honored glory an American soldier, known but to God”; eventually featuring three adjacent crypts by 1984, each marked with a marble slab, two containing the unidentified remains of a U.S. soldier killed in World War Two and Korea, the third (middle) slab empty since the remains were identified in 1998 and now serving as a marker for all unaccounted Vietnam-era U.S. service members with an inscription reading “Honoring and Keeping Faith with America’s Missing Servicemen, 1958-1975.”

Jeep Rubicon [50/49 B.C.]

Leniency with the timeframe doesn’t provide much in the way of painting a nicer image for either side of our titular location. Within the prior century — we’ll call this one hundred years north of the river’s bank for added lyricism — the Republic of Rome certainly isn’t much to nostalgize.

The macro: a nonstop churn of military conquest and subjugation; enslavement economies of such a scale that three uprisings are violent and/or desperate enough to receive their own designations (The Servile Wars: tens of thousands dead, crucifixions galore, and, before you ask, don’t worry, the Jeep Gladiator* dropped this year), civil wars, proscriptions, and political jockeying all with the end result of pervasive factionalism, socioeconomic strife, and an increasingly powerful and volatile oligarchy.



The micro: “[89 B.C.] A. Sempronius Asellio attempted to give…debtors some relief by issuing an edict that revived the fourth-century B.C. law prohibiting interest. He was killed by a mob of angry creditors.”



And the next hundred years and beyond? More coups, more proscriptions, and eventually the establishment of a capital E Empire, god emperor-and-all. And with that the subsequent Neros, Caliguals, Commoduses, Caracallas, civil wars, enslavement, colonial repression and nonstop colonizing — whoops, “civilizing” — missions before eventual decay and collapse.

*The Jeep Gladiator Rubicon has been named to the 2020 Hagerty Hot List — for vehicles likely to endure the test of time with collectors and car fans by offering sustained popularity and value.



Is a self-aware ecological death cult participant more refreshing? Is the not knowing and not wanting to know charming? To their credit, confidence only makes taking notice, much less criticism, appear naive — no denying there are worse things to be confronted within the realms extracting and consuming toxic, non-replenishable fuels than a particular brand identity.

Take a lesson here and own it: an all new NASCAR competition called the Manhattan Project. The Unit 731 luxury SUV. Private jet series Seals One through Seven. Some things require a few more writing skills than I’ve got.

The Augustus of Prima Porta


I’m not here to moralize someone’s aesthetic preferences (alright, maybe a little). Still, unlearning is an ongoing process and we are all responsible for it. Thankfully things get a little easier once one arms oneself with some additional knowledge.



It doesn’t matter to me one way or another if the current color reconstructions of the Augustus of Prima Porta will ever be certain — the fact remains that once we can break through the nonsense conceptual “purity” of white marble and into the reality of an empire’s dolling up their representations of various egomaniacs, one’s appreciation for the human form can be separated from the need to buy into the unbelievable tackiness that spreads onto everything colonial force touch, even 2000 years ago.



You may as well have a one-ton, fiberglass George C. Wallace or Custer shaking hands with Grimace. A grinning, non-biodegradable murderer in technicolor waving by a fucking condo.

Jacob Yeates is a fiscal year 2022 recipient of a Creative Support for Individuals grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board. This activity is made possible by the voters of Minnesota through a grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board, thanks to a legislative appropriation from the Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund.

Physical copy for scale.

The adulterated bodies were here.
We are talking tabula rasa. We are talking logistics. We are talking middle management with aspirations. We are talking imports and exports. We are talking shorts. We are talking manifests and destinies. We are talking wet works.

The overdeveloped bodies were here.
We are talking low risk high yield. We are talking stakes and claims. We are talking elbow grease. We are talking brass tacks. We are talking speculation. We are talking portfolios. We are talking rubber stamps.

The violable bodies were here.
We are talking pivoting. We are talking states and exceptions. We are talking mitigation. We are talking preemption. We are talking forced hands. We are talking bears and bulls. We are talking hardball.

The objectifiable bodies were here.
We are talking trimming the fat. We are talking known unknowns. We are talking protocol. We are talking disrupters. We are talking futures. We are talking dead weight. We are talking enhanced techniques. We are talking final frontiers.

The quantifiable bodies were here.
We are talking consolidation. We are talking means and ends. We are talking skin in the game. We are talking market forces. We are talking realpolitik. We are talking measures of men. We are talking laws and averages.

Flyer for House of 1000 Queers "Seance" 2024 event.

Flyer for House of 1000 Queers "Seance" 2024 event.

Flyer for House of 1000 Queers "Worm Pit" 2024 event.

House of 1000 Queers: Worm Pit promotional variant (first of four).

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House of 1000 Queers: Worm Pit promotional variant (third of four).

House of 1000 Queers: Worm Pit promotional variant (fourth of four).

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House of 1000 Queers: Corporate America promotional variant (first of three).

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House of 1000 Queers: Corporate America promotional variant (third of three).

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House of 1000 Queers: Heavy Metal promotional variant (first of three).

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I. Locus
Inmate Billings, stripped to the waist, his body aged taut like a dancer’s, wraps arms around a thrashing DiCaprio and mounts him, mashing screaming cop face against the dripping chain link fencing of a badly lit stairwell.

II. Quotations
We hear things about the outside world. About atolls, about H-bomb tests. You know how a hydrogen bomb works? Other bombs explode, right? But not the hydrogen bomb. It implodes, creating an explosion to the thousandth, the millionth degree! Do you get it? Do you?

III. Orientation
Adapted for the screen by Martin Scorsese and Laeta Kalogridis in 2010, Dennis Lehane’s Shutter Island is set in 1954, eight years after the United States’ most recent iteration of federally-enforced relocation—some one hundred fifteen thousand-plus human beings on the basis of several arbitrary genetic markers and familial heritage, either admitted or assumed—nine years after some two hundred thousand-plus human beings were incinerated, concussed, and/or irradiated to death by the United States’ (historic!) use of nuclear fission weaponry, and sixty-five years prior to the cumulative total of however many several million-plus killings said State(s) had sanctioned by 2019.

IV. Exposition
Thankfully, several twists later, we are given the straight dope: DiCaprio’s investigation of the disappearance of an institutionalized woman, leading to the discovery of her facility’s experimentation with psychotropic drugs and ideological reprogramming on seditious and/or disposable segments of the population, is merely the result of extended hallucinations, birthed by a distressed (crazy) Leo who is overwhelmed (crazy) with the guilt of shooting his (crazy) wife, who, during a moment of extreme disassociated (crazy) resulting from bipolar disorder, drowned their three children. As such, any and all disquieting (crazy) thoughts we may have experienced as Leo wrestled with notions of oppression or various industrial complexes are merely the result of his compromised (crazy) lens into which we have been, quite unwillingly, forced.

V. Concessions
Still, we love Leo and we need the police and we are terrified of these places that we build and our only definitions of rape require the assailed to be visibly overpowered by a shuddering, half-naked man panting into an ear.

VI. Revisions:
For Shutter Island to have truly succeeded, appropriate funding and media hype would have been secured for the production of a sequel, a work of such simultaneous depth and immediacy, all viewers, near and far, would be in the process of removing shirts from bodies wasted by institutionalized poverty or neoliberal wellness tenets and physically subduing all police officers, all private security and defense contractors, all military police, all FBI, CIA and ICE agents, all prison employees, all marines, national guard, army, navy, and air force personnel, all lobbyists, all state and federal bureaucrats, and actively describing to them our understandings, both theoretical and experiential, of what approximately six hundred eight-six trillion plus another two hundred billion dollars’ worth of conceptual to microbial to fist to State-sized holes blown into our bodies looks like, feels like, per year, of how a hydrogen bomb works, before we are murdered by their sleepwalking friends and family.

There are any number of emotive terms we can attribute to these men these boys these murders—hate, fear, desperation, confusion; there are any number of reasons we can point to for what they do—sustained and cyclical abuses, misfiring chemicals, the desires and demands of patriarchy, self-loathing born of the impossibilities of this country’s obsessive adherence to meritocracy and its grinding wheels of capital, the disasters of white supremacy.
But however pervasive and tragic these structures and circumstances, however impossible many situations these men these boys find themselves facing, conditions remain such that these supposedly inevitable forces will always win out over the bodies and minds of those in their lines of fire.
And I am as suspicious of the State’s ability to regulate weaponry beyond its own colonial interests as I am of my own and those of humans with bodies like mine in transforming status quos from figures alternating between facedown in bloody pools and upright in cages to something better. But it is clear the powers so many are subject to both sought to make me in their image and were made with the needs of that image in mind. And so I am responsible. And until I and others in many ways like me cease to benefit from whatever forces of empire, capital and supremacy that breed these byproducts these men these boys these murders, we are responsible.