Zak Smith is an artist, writer and occasional porn actor whose paintings appear in major public and private collections worldwide, including the Museum of Modern Art and the Whitney Museum. His books include
Pictures Showing What Happens on Each Page of Thomas Pynchon's Novel Gravity's Rainbow
and the autobiographical
We Did Porn
.
On March 5th, the Associated Press asked: "What are seemingly jet-propelled cats and birds doing in a 16th century German artillery manual?" It was a good question.
What the cats and the birds were doing was the same thing everything else in the manual was doing: being recommended by one Conrad Haas as instruments of war.
The sparse comments from the historian the AP interviewed were even more unsettling
