And what if it is love one is trying to understand, that strange unmanageable phenomenon or form of life, source at once of illumination and confusion, agony and beauty? Love, in its many varieties, and their tangled relations to the good human life, to aspiration, to general social concern? What parts of oneself, what method, …
Camp art is often decorative art, emphasizing texture, sensuous surface, and style at the expense of content. Susan Sontag, Notes on “Camp” Macho Types Wanted. Must Dance and Have a Moustache. Advertisement in the Village Voice, 1978, as quoted in Midgley, Alex. “‘Macho Types Wanted: The Village People, Homophobia, and Representation in the 1970s,” Australasian …
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There is a Hebrew word: “zakhor.” It means both memory and action. To remember, in this tradition, is not to recall a fact. It is to fulfill an ethical obligation. To make the past present through attention. – Joan Westenberg See also: obligations to the past
I wonder what my life would be like if I’d stuck with model trains rather than taking up blogging. Probably less stressful.
I really do feel like blogging is onto its second wind. The amount of influence you can have on the world by consistently blogging about a subject is just as high today as it was back in the 2000s when blogging first started. The best time to start a blog may have been twenty years …
A friend (thanks R!) hipped me to Ross Gay’s Book of Delights, which is what it says on the tin. It is full of charming morsels by a charming writer as he observers his own proclivity for delight. This is a useful life skill. I’m lingering over it a few morsels to start most days …
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For inscriptions to take place, witnesses are needed. Brighenti, A. M. (2010). At the wall: Graffiti writers, urban territoriality, and the public domain. _Space and Culture_, 13(3), 315-332. doi: 10.1177/1206331210365283 On the northbound morning Rail Runner out of Albuquerque’s downtown station, it’s best to sit on the left side of the train to see the …
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Work to avoid being somebody who discourages others from sharing their thoughts. – Simon Willison
It’s red sidewalk crack poppy season in Albuquerque. It’s a weird ecological niche, but Papaver rhoeas, the common corn poppy (it has a bunch of other names) seems to have mastered the sidewalk cracks in my neighborhood. Sciency people call it an archeophyte, a species that arose in its modern form in an evolutionary dance with humans. …
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It is an accident that my new bicycle is named after a 1960s cartoon superhero who fought supervillains in outer space with a sidekick named Blip. Blip was a monkey. I was on my own Saturday, no help from Blip, when my Space Ghost led me up a “trail” on the west side of the …