Air Heart
American spirit is a flying spirit that flies higher and further than the land of skyscrapers to find beauty.
It was 1998, and I needed an email address. E-mail was not available to everyone at their real identities back then. E-mailing was akin to C.B. radio—you used a handle. I remember thinking for a few seconds and then typing “aeelectra” into the little box on the Hotmail screen. Success. I had signed up.
It was an image that I had created in those few moments of trying to find a totemic pseudonym. It was silvery and fine. It was a photograph taken from National GeographicThe January 1998 issue. This photograph featured Amelia Earhart, a bust wearing a Mona Lisa smile. Her pilot’s license photo, a Venus in a fur-lined flying cap (freckled, gap-toothed, and tomboyish in the talking pictures), a high-modern Man Ray-esque tragic paradigm whom death stalked and fame carried.
Tragic Earhart went down with navigator Fred Noonan in Earhart’s Lockheed Electra 10E Special two days before July 4, 1937, to a grave…
