American Smooth

Howard Erker, Bobby Seale Checks Food Bags, March 31, 1972. Oakland Museum of California.

Black Community Survival Conference Rally at Greenman Field, March 28-31, 1972. KPIX Eyewitness News.

“To serve the people”, Philly Partisan, 2017.


We were dancing—it must have
been a foxtrot or a waltz,

something romantic but
requiring restraint,
rise and fall, precise
execution as we moved

American Smooth, Rita Dove

AG2026_1178172a


The Party, the Protest : Kay Gabriel and the Nightboat School of Poets, by Anahid Nersessian (Bookforum)

“Gabriel’s new book, Perverts, exemplifies the new poetry’s distinguishing features without being reducible to a narrow patch of typicals. It is queer and leftist, urbane, elegant but bawdy, erudite but steeped in popular culture, and passionately invested in forms of social life that feel distinctly contemporary—the party, the protest—but whose real history is ancient, even primordial.”


Nightboat Reading Lists.

AG2026_1178495a or a feeling he could not name but was disquieted by


a feeling he could not name but was disquieted by—longing? (Bel Canto, Ann Patchett)


Lutz Bacher. (… we don’t know the California-born artist’s real name, nor where her public-facing persona came from, but we do know this lifelong game of hide-and-seek was deliberate, an act of authorial resistance that framed her 50-year oeuvre)

AG2026_1200224a or Great Writ


Accordingly, the Court finds that the Constitution of these United States trumps this administration’s detention of petitioner Adrian Conejo Arias and his minor son, L.C.R. The Great Writ and release from detention are GRANTED pursuant to the attached Judgment.

Judge Biery, a federal judge in Texas’ Western District, granted their petition for a writ of habeas corpus. NYTimes annotates.

… But still
I buy a pack at Kingston airport mall—
jade confetti in a see-through sack.
That night I stew the leaves to make a tea—
to see her there, to plant her here with me.

Guinea Hen Weed, Hannah lowe

AG2026_1200574a or tell of days in goodness spent


I.

She walks in beauty, like the night
Of cloudless climes and starry skies;
And all that’s best of dark and bright
Meet in her aspect and her eyes:
Thus mellowed to that tender light
Which heaven to gaudy day denies.

II.

One shade the more, one ray the less,
Had half impaired the nameless grace
Which waves in every raven tress,
Or softly lightens o’er her face;
Where thoughts serenely sweet express
How pure, how dear their dwelling place.

III.

And on that cheek, and o’er that brow,
So soft, so calm, yet eloquent,
The smiles that win, the tints that glow,
But tell of days in goodness spent,
A mind at peace with all below,
A heart whose love is innocent!

She Walks in Beauty, George Gordon Byron

Public sphere and its naturalized exclusions


“Rosalyn Deutsche has argued that the public sphere remains democratic
only insofar as its naturalized exclusions are taken into account and made open to
contestation: “Conflict, division, and instability, then, do not ruin the democratic
public sphere; they are conditions of its existence.” Deutsche takes her lead from
Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe’s Hegemony and Socialist Strategy: Towards a
Radical Democratic Politics. Published in 1985, Laclau and Mouffe’s Hegemony is one
of the first books to reconsider Leftist political theory through the lens of post-
structuralism, following what the authors perceived to be an impasse of Marxist
theorization in the 1970s. Their text is a rereading of Marx through Gramsci’s the-
or y of hegemony and Lacan’s under st anding of subject ivit y as split and
decentered.”

“Jean-Luc Nancy’s critique of the Marxist idea of community as communion in The Inoperative
Community
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991) has been crucial to my consideration of a counter-model to relational aesthetics. Since the mid-1990s, Nancy’s text has become an increasingly important reference point for writers on contemporary art, as seen in Rosalyn Deutsche, Evictions; chapter 4 of Pamela M. Lee’s Object to Be Destroyed: The Work of Gordon Matta-Clark (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2000); George Baker, “Relations and Counter-Relations: An Open Letter to Nicolas Bourriaud,” in Zusammenhänge herstellen/Contextualise, ed. Yilmaz Dziewior (Cologne: Dumont, 2002); and Jessica Morgan, Common Wealth (London: Tate Publishing, 2003).”

Antagonism and Relational Aesthetics, Claire Bishop.


Divina proportione, written by Luca Pacioli.