Taylor Negron

Our family business was operating batting cages. The pitching machine spit out the balls at lightning speed. Don Drysdale, Sandy Koufax. Whitey Ford. 50 cents for 12 pitches. Of course, my mother ran the place, and I was her slave: selling candy, hosing down the street, and the most dreaded of all jobs, feeding the pitching machine with balls.

It should be clear by now that my focus here is not freedom of speech or the press. This freedom is all too often an exaggeration. At the very least, blind references to freedom of speech or the press serve as a distraction from the critical examination of other communications policies.

The thrill of a photo-realist painter is if you get really close to the painting, it looks just like a photograph. Whereas in my case, if you get close to my paintings, they totally fall apart - so I'm about as far from a photo-realist as it gets.