Author: dig

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[…]

James Baldwin wrote:

“The place in which I’ll fit
Will not exist
Until I make it.”

New York, city of invention,
Roiling town, refresher
And re-newer,

New York, city of the real,
Where the canyons
Whisper in a hundred
Tongues,

New York,
Where your lucky self
Waits for your
Arrival,

Where there is always soil
For your root.

This is our time.

The taste of us/the spice of us
The hollers and the rhythms and
The beats of us.

In the echo of our
Ancestors,
Who made certain we know
Who we are.

City of Insistence,
City of Resistance,

…

Proof, Cornelius Eady

No relief in Florida’s elections results.

The Affective turn; Brian Massumi, Eve Sedgwick (aeon)

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By dissociative life I mean a life lived in intimate relation to life in a lifeworld that is also, and at the same time, apprehended ambivalently, from engaged distances, in an affective structure where inhabitants dwell in a detachment that does not signify an absence of feeling.

[or]

… being in life without wanting the world (Berlant)

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Obama Joked and Skewered, Susan B. Glasser (New Yorker)

That was the interesting thing about how the Administration responded to the speech I gave the other day. They did not dispute what I said about them being directly responsible for rising prices. Did not argue with that! They did not deny tariffs were contributing to higher costs for families. They didn’t say anything about that! I accused this Administration based on the facts that they were engaging in unprecedented levels of corruption. They didn’t say anything about that! The President wasn’t even mad about the Saddam Hussein comparison. That part didn’t bother him! But he was very upset about the Cheesecake Factory comments. He took great umbrage. He said I didn’t understand the work of the artisans in the White House.

And they mobilized. I mean, it’s all crazy, but this was the really crazy part. They mobilized a whole-of-government response to that joke—not to inflation but to that joke! The White House even called the Secretary of the Treasury. This is the man who is in charge of the economy, the person who’s supposed to be figuring out how to make your life more affordable, the guy who’s supposed to be figuring out how to lower inflation and reduce interest rates. They told him he should hold a press conference in front of the Cheesecake Factory. . . . And the Treasury Secretary, he happens to be a former hedge-fund manager worth half a billion dollars. And he was out there in front of the Cheesecake Factory, explaining how he ordered the delicious French-dip cheeseburger instead of the egg rolls. Now, look, this is not something I ever thought of. I inherited this major financial crisis. I never called my Treasury Secretary, Tim Geithner, and said, ‘Man, you’ve got to go to Arby’s, order roast beef. No cheese, though. That may look élitist.’

To everybody out there, including the press, I want you to understand this. This is what I mean when I say these are not serious people. They don’t have solutions to actual problems, so they’d rather have the media and you talking about the Cheesecake Factory.

Barack Obama