You've got to dig to dig it, you dig?
‘… where pleasure and beauty and hours with no quantifiable practical result fit into the life of someone, […], who also cared about justice and truth and human rights and how to change the world.”
“Even as ornament, flowers represent life itself, as fertility, mortality, transience, extravagance, and as such they enter our art, rites, and language.” – Rebecca Solnit, Orwell’s Roses.
You are a
land I can’t
stand leaving
and can’t not.
My party ship
is pulling out.
We all have
hats. I try to
toot some notes
you’ll understand
but this was not
our instrument
or plan.
Party Ship, Kay Ryan
New York Real Estate and the Ruin of American Art*, Josh Kline. October (2026) (195): 91–109. https://doi.org/10.1162/OCTO.a.539
Isn’t X Beautiful!, Odette Elix England (The Ice Plant)
As a form, it is both specific, that is, recognizable, and infinitely transmutable; it transforms itself easily to thrive in different times and places.
Always situated in a particular place, a territory, a neighborhood, a forest, a specific milieu, the commune form is about “producing” spaces
– Kristin Ross
“Let me start again. Paradox is not new. In this unsteady
moment, being okay with uncertainty is what I
need to do to have a calm sense of anything. “
Abecedarian at the Threshold, Laura Van Prooyen (SWWIM)
Winter Worm, Summer Grass, Mimosa Echard. Longlati Foundation.
Arizona, John Edgar Wideman (NewYorker). Always!!
The community programs obviously addressed real needs. Objectively, however, they were more important to the existence of the party as an organization than they were to the survival of the black community. Survival programs were originally instituted not only to serve the people but also to improve the party’s image in the black community by providing positive, disciplined activities for the membership.
The Panther Party also envisioned the community programs as introducing socialism in practical and concrete terms. Donations solicited from businesses were a means of redistributing wealth from the haves to the have-nots.
Survival pending revolution : the history of the Black Panther Party, Paul Alkebulan. 2007.
and lose himself in the mechanics of the ordinary
was there any point in being alive without helping one another?
the small things […] when added up, amounted to a life.
Claire Keegan, Small Things Like These (Oprah’s Book Club)
The True Things A Conversation with Naghmeh Sohrabi (Bidoun).
These Are the True Things (Substack)
An elegant man
must never be completely elegant.
There’s no man more inelegant than a despot
power is always tacky.
There’s no elegant way to invade, pillage, and kill.
Nothing’s tackier than a uniform.
Nothing’s tackier than a toga.
My Grandfather Is the Future, Victor Heringer, translated by James Young & Justin Greene (Granta)
I have signed two contracts as a poet
which are henceforth no longer binding.
I will sign a third, as a final betrayal.
I will be forgiven by everyone.
I Am Not a Poet, Victor Heringer, translated by James Young & Justin Greene
Everyday Travails, October 10 – November 7, 2009, David Castillo Gallery.
“The works reveal a structured imprint of the everyday, in the exploration of the relationship of media to the psycho-geographical, social, and political nature of place. Adler Guerrier sets drawing, collage, sculpture, photo, video, and installation in dialogue. His inspired cultural hybrid between color and plane are anchored by fearless, site-specific subversions of place and time in regards to conceptions of race, class, and culture. Often calling upon the districts of Miami and his own backyard, Guerrier examines the contemporary flaneur in an impending post-demographic age.”
Paul Claude Gardere. Flickr, 2009.
[…]
However, I have never clogged myself with the praises of pastoral life, nor with nostalgia for an innocent past of perverted acts in pastures. No. One need never leave the confines of New York to get all the greenery one wishes—I can’t even enjoy a blade of grass unless I know there’s a subway handy, or a record store or some other sign that people do not totally regret life. It is more important to affirm the least sincere; the clouds get enough attention as it is and even they continue to pass. Do they know what they’re missing? Uh huh.
Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency”
Hilton Als on the Whitney Biennial (New Yorker)
Spontaneous Objects A Natural History of Art and Its Others (Penn State University Press, 2026)
—A Virtual Book Launch : Rebecca Zorach (Northwestern University), Monica Azzolini (University of Bologna), and Stephen Campbell (Johns Hopkins University). Apr 03, 2026, 12:00pm–1:00pm.
“In the late medieval and early modern periods, European artists, theorists, and natural philosophers imagined Nature not simply as a force of reproduction but as an artist in its own right—a creative power capable of generating images, artifacts, and objects of beauty.”