let's get political
ask yourself are you passenger or crew?
A special Friday, less-than-two-weeks-since-my-last-update update since I don’t know how I’m going to feel about newsletters and stuff this time next week.
Speaking of, I enjoyed this recent roundup by my mostly online/occasionally IRL friend
. The bit that’s stayed with me the most over the last couple of days is what Fiona Hill writes in Politico about how Trump thinks of people not as individuals but as categories. Anyway, if you’re in the US, please get out and vote.Today is World Vegan Day! You can watch a sweet, animated version of the true story of Matilda the Pig, produced by Ed Winters, also known as Earthling Ed, and narrated by Bella Ramsey. Also free to stream today is Christspiracy, a documentary that explores the connection between animal ethics and religion. I’ve written about my own journey away from eating/using animal products here, here, and here.
It’s interesting to re-read the intro to my one-week crash course on veganism in May 2020. I quoted Jonathan Safran Foer in this NYTimes OpEd: “Our hand has been reaching for the doorknob for the last few years. Covid-19 has kicked open the door.” Conversely, my general impression of the pandemic effect on this sort of thing nearly 5 years later is now quite the opposite, with a lot of folks understandably (it was a hard time!) looking to satisfy quick desires to reclaim a bit of the joy of daily life. Which gets me to something artist Oliver Jeffers said toward the end of his July 2024 interview with Debbie Millman for Design Matters (recently replayed as a “best of” episode) about the pandemic versus, for example, World War II. He shares an anecdote related to the inception of Begin Again, about chatting with an older woman carrying groceries home right before pandemic lockdown in Northern Ireland. She says to him:
“For awhile I thought this was going to remind me of the war…but it’s not. Because back then we all tried to see how we could help. But look around, everyone’s just trying to see what they can get away with.”
Jeffers continues: “How do we return back to that sense of how can I help?” And quotes astronaut Nicole Stott: “How can we go from being passengers on this spaceship Earth to being its only crew.”
Will every newsletter update (e.g. here and here) include something about artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude? Time will tell. As I’ve mentioned a few times before, I’m slowly re-reading and notating a 113-page compilation of all the blog posts I wrote while in Boston to attend grad school (for what I’m not yet sure). During my final, post-thesis semester (the MFA program at the time was a 2-year program with an additional 1-2 semesters for your thesis exhibition…mine was in December of my 3rd year), I wrote about missing a bunch of events one week, most notably: “on my way to Connecticut for the weekend when the [Boston] MFA screened The Gates, complete with the presence of artists Christo and Jeanne-Claude and director Albert Maysles.” When I’m on my death bed I’m pretty sure this will remain one of the biggest regrets of my life!
As part of the above effort, I also came across and wrote on Instagram about this piece I made for my fellow grad student’s thesis exhibition. Read more there or here.
Metaconsumption, 2007 Really enjoyed this Marginalian post about Franz Kafka and the “the bi-polar nature of time-anxiety in creative work.” Did you know that Kafka had a day job at an insurance company?
I have too little time and quiet to draw out of me all the possibilities of my talent.
Finally got around to watching the Flipside documentary by fellow GenXer, Chris Wilcha, and I absolutely loved it. It was so validating and refreshing to hear others touch on some of the struggles of trying to balance work, family, and art. I think so much of the narrative around this with respect to creativity and visual art is perhaps a bit too focused on productivity. Like, how can I be more creative (to what end, I always wonder), how can I find time to make more art, etc., when really, for me, it’s about that (I do want more time to make stuff) but it’s also about having a voice and an audience/community, and yes, recognition and validation. At the end of the day, we all just want to feel seen.
We recently watched all four seasons of The Umbrella Academy and I highly recommend it (and because it’s World Vegan Day, I feel compelled to point out that both Elliot Page and Aidan Gallagher are vegan). This was definitely one of my favorite scenes.
SFMOMA announced this week a retrospective of Ruth Asawa’s work planned for April 2025. I wrote about Asawa’s work back in January after finishing this book.
Finally for this week, I wrote about the 19th anniversary of my blog here. I can’t remember now who made this joke but somebody once pondered how funny it would have been if instead of “blog,” which is a portmanteau of the words web and log, we called it a web diary instead, leaving us with “bdiary” for short. To be a bdiaryer sounds…unpleasant.
It’s going to be a stressful few weeks no matter the outcome of next week’s US election. Hang in there, my fellow earthlings!
Thanks for the mention!