Before the dawning Of my life; I was the river Forever winding To purple dreaming, I was the glowing Of youthful Springtime, I was the singing Of golden songbirds,—
[…]
I was the vision Of youthful striving, I was the summer, I was the autumn, I was the All-time— I was love.
“Can it be politics without foregrounding dissonance?”
“All sexual experiment in this film has transformative—animating, nauseating, life-threatening—consequences for the participants, whose drama is to want it all: but the task of le mariage pop is to invent an ordinariness for it. In another register we might call that politics.”
via Berlant reading of Last Tango in Paris, directed by Bernardo Bertolucci, 1972.
Soft Occupation at Sobremesa. A show organized by Juan Pablo Garza.
Reflections of Buhaina, Art Blakey & the Jazz Messengers, 6:47.
Free flight, Ernie Henry, 5:47.
This kind of concern with managing the inevitable disturbance of intimacy, codependency, or the passions …”
“a scene of a disturbance that smudges the differences among care, pleasure, control focus, and harm tests how we imagine being in the world together.” LB
Open Call to artists of Haitian descent: Collaborate with the ALAN LOMAX audio archive of Haiti in the 1930s. Due : June 15, 2026. (Haitian Cultural Exchange)
O Thou bright jewel in my aim I strive To comprehend thee. Thine own words declare Wisdom is higher than a fool can reach. I cease to wonder, and no more attempt Thine height t’explore, or fathom thy profound. But, O my soul, sink not into despair, Virtue is near thee, and with gentle hand Would now embrace thee, hovers o’er thine head. Fain would the heav’n-born soul with her converse, Then seek, then court her for her promis’d bliss.
Auspicious queen, thine heav’nly pinions spread, And lead celestial Chastity along; Lo! now her sacred retinue descends, Array’d in glory from the orbs above. Attend me, Virtue, thro’ my youthful years! O leave me not to the false joys of time! But guide my steps to endless life and bliss. Greatness, or Goodness, say what I shall call thee, To give an higher appellation still, Teach me a better strain, a nobler lay, O thou, enthron’d with Cherubs in the realms of day!
Being called all manner of things from the Dictionary of Shame— not English, not words, not heard, but worn, borne, carried, never spent— we feel now a largeness coming on, something passing into us. We know not in what source it was begun, but rapt, we watch it rise through our fallen, our slain, our millions dragged, chained. Like daylight setting leaves alight— green to gold to blinding white. Like a spirit caught. Flame-in-flesh. I watched a woman try to shake it, once, from her shoulders and hips. A wild annihilating fright. Other women formed a wall around her, holding back what clamored to rise. God. Devil. Ancestor. What Black bodies carry through your schools, your cities. Do you see how mighty you’ve made us, all these generations running? Every day steeling ourselves against it. Every day coaxing it back into coils. And all the while feeding it. And all the while loving it.