Beside the tree
Beside the chair
Beside the house
Beside the pit
Beside the tree stump
Coco say don’t climb?/?so I don’t?/?I sit & stare?—?
[…]
Beside the tree stump I sit I sit I sit ’til no one even know
I’m (t)here
Coco(nut), Mahogany L. Browne
Melissa Wallen: Between Sleep and Sky, October 5, 2024-November 9, 2024, Baker-Hall.
Jeremy Deller, Can Art Change the World?, Louisana Channel.
Communal forms of “inhabiting” or “sharing usage”—particularly of the land—are directly political in a way that allows us to break with modalities of ideology and identitarianism.
[…]
When people of starkly different backgrounds and beliefs come together pragmatically on an everyday basis to perform the tasks and devise the ever-shifting agendas of a territorial occupation, something like a polemical political community is created. Composition begins when people of different origins, with different ways of thinking, different histories and relations to the land, different skills, and sometimes vastly different risk tolerance decide to act together, under the presumption of equality, to defend a territory. A new collective subject—the result of mutual displacements and dis-identifications and the action of equals as equals—is produced, essentially, through practice, through creative, shared engagement in building, defending, and sustaining the life of the occupation day by day. The product of a massive investment in organizing life in common, composition dispenses with the kinds of exclusions based on ideas, identities, or ideologies so frequently encountered in radical milieus, the whole tired sectarianism of the history of the left. As such, it is a manner of making a world, the weaving together of a new kind of solidarity—one where the unity of experience counts more than the divergence of opinions, and one that amplifies, as well, Kropotkin’s conviction that solidarity is not an ethics or a moral sentiment but, rather, a revolutionary strategy, and perhaps the most important one of all.
Kristin Ross, Composition, e-flux, Excerpt from The Commune Form: The Transformation of Everyday Life (Verso, 2024)
Ceramic League of Miami hosted Lisa Orr, who led the building of and the firing of a Rocket Kiln.
Rocket stoves seems to burn wood quite efficiently and performs without smoke.
Leah Mandel on Mike Kelley’s Kandors, in Poetry Foundation.
Superman happened upon the bottle city while on assignment for The Daily Planet. Disguised as bumbling, totally normal reporter Clark Kent, he spotted a spaceship, some ten thousand miles from Earth, on which the data-obsessed villain Brainiac was collecting cities to repopulate his own ruined planet. A long panel in Action Comics #242 from July 1958 shows London, Paris, Rome, and New York, all miniaturized, in a row of glass jars. “One after another, the world’s greatest cities become toy villages in bottles!” the accompanying block letters read. Brainiac examines his spoils with giant tweezers that rip through the George Washington Bridge. “Bah! Such primitive structures,” he gripes, holding the Eiffel Tower under a magnifying glass. Determined to stop Brainiac’s scheme, Superman returns to Metropolis and allows his city, with him in it, to be shrunk. Brainiac studies his new acquisition with glee. Tiny as he is, Superman retains his powers and buzzes like a bee out of the bottle. Fleeing Brainiac’s swatter, he hides in an open container—and as he plunks down, suddenly deprived of flight, past futuristic skyscrapers, Superman realizes he’s not alone after all. He’s in Kandor.
All of the cities on Brainiac’s ship are ultimately returned to normal size and put back where they belong—except Kandor. At the end of “The Super-Duel In Space,” Superman tucks the bottle city under his arm, takes it to the North Pole, and places it on a shelf in his Fortress of Solitude.
late, in aqua and ermine, …
[…]
… and here
you are: poised, between husbands
and factions, …
[…]
No matter, Hattie: It’s a long, beautiful walk
into that flower-smothered standing ovation,
so go on
and make them wait.
Hattie McDaniel Arrives at the Coconut Grove, Rita dove
Studies suggest How may I help you officer? is the single most disarming thing to say and not What’s the problem? Studies suggest it’s best the help reply My pleasure and not No problem. Studies suggest it’s best not to mention problem in front of power even to say there is none.
Social Skills Training, Solmaz Sharif
In ancient Greece, theater actors wore masks called prosopon, which, in the most basic sense, means “face.” But the true reach of the word is much broader, for a prosopon is not merely a face but an extension and expression of the essence of a person. Etymologically, it seems to derive from the Greek pros, “to,” “toward,” or “at,” and ?pa, “face” or “eye.” A prosopon, then, is the means by which something is presented outward, to someone else. The Greeks considered a painter’s brush a prosopon, because she uses it to make concrete and visible to others what is interior to herself; a sculptor’s clay, or her mycelium, is a prosopon too.
A Living Requiem, Anahid Nersessian, NYRB.
18 Years of The Marginalian.
16. Unself. Nothing is more tedious than self-concern — the antipode of wonder.
14. Choose joy.
9. Don’t be afraid to be an idealist.
8. Seek out what magnifies your spirit.
7. “Expect anything worthwhile to take a long time.” This is borrowed from the wise and wonderful Debbie Millman, for it’s hard to better capture something so fundamental yet so impatiently overlooked in our culture of immediacy. The myth of the overnight success is just that — a myth — as well as a reminder that our present definition of success needs serious retuning. The flower doesn’t go from bud to blossom in one spritely burst and yet, as a culture, we’re disinterested in the tedium of the blossoming. But that’s where all the real magic unfolds in the making of one’s character and destiny.
I might have chose well.
