dig

Dig

  • AG2026_1830372a sways to the tune

    AG2026_1830372a

    Droning a drowsy syncopated tune,
    Rocking back and forth to a mellow croon,
    I heard a Negro play.
    Down on Lenox Avenue the other night
    By the pale dull pallor of an old gas light
    He did a lazy sway. . . .
    He did a lazy sway. . . .
    To the tune     o’ those Weary Blues.
    With his ebony hands on each ivory key
    He made that poor piano moan with melody.
    O Blues!
    Swaying to and fro on his rickety stool
    He played that sad raggy tune like a musical fool.
    Sweet Blues!
    Coming from a black man’s soul.
    O Blues!
    In a deep song voice with a melancholy tone
    I heard that Negro sing, that old piano moan—
    “Ain’t got nobody in all this world,
    Ain’t got nobody but ma self.
    I’s gwine to quit ma frownin’
    And put ma troubles on the shelf.”

    Thump, thump, thump, went his foot on the floor.
    He played a few chords then he sang some more—
    “I got the Weary Blues
    And I can’t be satisfied.
    Got the Weary Blues
    And can’t be satisfied—
    I ain’t happy no mo’
    And I wish that I had died.”
    And far into the night he crooned that tune.
    The stars went out and so did the moon.
    The singer stopped playing and went to bed
    While the Weary Blues echoed through his head.
    He slept like a rock or a man that’s dead.

    The Weary Blues, Langston Hughes

  • AG2026_MG_7479a or lush and bare

    AG2026_MG_7479a

    Jacob Lawrence
    Could paint
    The beauty
    Of ?bareness

    Blacks
    Moved North
    Leaving
    Empty
    Rooms
    Behind
    Them

    Lawrence’s genius
    Was to paint
    Those rooms
    Left behind

    Brown bare
    Wooden rooms
    Light brown plank walls
    Dark brown plank floors

    A single dark green
    Shade
    Covering
    The window
    Erasing the lush landscape

    Creating a
    Stark beauty
    A simple beauty
    A bare beauty

    The Beauty of Bareness, William J. Harris

  • AG2026_MG_8350a as wish fulfillment

    AG2026_MG_8350a

    exhibition has been put together by the team behind the DRAW Project. Based on a proposal by Rafael Domenech, Sonia Rosa Kahn, Loïc Le Gall, Alejandro Valencia. This exhibition is supported by 193 Gallery, Paris. July 3 — October 17 2026.

    Pleasure is paramount for literary theorist Northrop Frye’s definition of romance, as wish fulfillment: “[T]he quest-romance is the search of the libido or desiring self for a fulfillment that will deliver it from the anxieties of reality but will still contain that reality.”

    the pleasures of genre and romance are the smooth operators of recurrence and relief, certainty. So unlike life, this smoothness swoons on the weft for expectations and the warp of their fulfillment, pleasure with insurance.

    We repeat aesthetic pleasure, we repeat as aesthetic pleasure, because repetition is a—the—truth of psychic life.

    Love’s Work, Anna Kornbluh (Parapraxis)

  • AG2026_MG_7403a or the weight of my life

    AG2026_MG_7403a

    He was as a god,
    stepped out of eternal dream
    along the boardwalk.

    He looked at my girl,
    a dream to herself and
    that was the end of them.

    They disappeared beside the sea
    at Revere Beach as
    I aint seen them since.

    If you find anyone
    answering their description
    please let me know. I need them

    to carry the weight of my life
    The old gods are gone. What lives on
    in my heart

    is their flesh
    like a wound,
    a tomb, a bomb.

    Billie, John Wieners

  • AG2021_2050443a or a creative vision of a world

    AG2021_2050443a

    Monk meets Lautréamont on the night train to freedom. It is
    one of many chance encounters that reveal a deep affinity be-
    tween black life and culture and surrealism    . Neither man would
    have identified himself as a surrealist, although Lautréamont,
    along with another nineteenth-century French poet named
    Arthur Rimbaud, are considered the spiritual fathers of surrealism
    before the movement was declared after World War I. And yet
    they embody the basic principles of surrealism, a living, mutable,
    creative vision of a world where love, play, human dignity, an end
    to poverty and want, and imagination are the pillars of freedom    .

    Freedom Dreams, Robin Kelley

  • Our relationship to this domain–beauty

    Merve Emre with László Krasznahorkai (New Yorker)

    Everything that is beautiful—whether natural or created by human beings, whether created by God or by life itself—exists in an inviolable domain, which never changes. Only we change, only our relationship to this domain changes, our chances of connecting to it change. In the Renaissance, our chances improved, and now in our modern age they have been ruined, our chances of making this perfect beauty appear, of stepping into relation to it, for it to hold our souls.

    […]

    The first movement of despair, when a person is uncertain, when they feel frail, is to start looking for a form that will free them from this uncertainty, and then these political ideologies start coming very easily, without any kind of serious philosophical background, or even without any philosophical background whatsoever.

    I don’t need anything from here.

    László Krasznahorkai, translated, from the Hungarian, by Ottilie Mulzet.

    Red International and Black Caribbean, Communists in New York City, Mexico and the West Indies, 1919-1939, Margaret Stevens

    Good habits for eye care. (CNET) The American Optometric Association recommends using the 20-20-20 rule to prevent computer vision syndrome. Every 20 minutes, look at something at least 20 feet away for 20 seconds.

    AG2026_1155927a
    AG2026_1155927a

  • how this land really is, of how it has always been

    TRACKS-ARTE on politics and criticality in the recent Puerto Rican music.

    there needs to be a map of how this land really is, of how it has always been, of what lies beneath whatever order or disorder others might impose upon it. There must be a way to create such a document.

    To map is to assume power. We can redraw the very land we walk upon, record it how it is, how it was, how it will be. We will not use their names, their estate lines, their plantation boundaries, their barracks: these shall be erased. The very essence of the land, the soil is exactly—”

    Land, Maggie O’Farrell

  • Not “overtly racial”

    The matter of race was central to the T.P.S. case, Adam Liptak writes. Trump has a history of derogatory statements against Haitians: He has accused them of “poisoning the blood” of the nation, accused them of “eating the pets” of their neighbors, and described their home country as a “shithole” that is “filthy, dirty, disgusting.”

    If discrimination was “a motivating factor” in Trump’s determination, the leading precedent said, it would violate the Constitution’s equal protection clause. But Justice Samuel Alito, writing for the majority, concluded that Trump’s comments had not cleared that bar. The president’s statements, he wrote, were not “overtly racial.”

    Justice Elena Kagan, in her dissent, was incredulous. “The references — of filth, disease and primitiveness — are shot through with racial stereotypes and tropes,” she wrote. (NYTimes)

    Mullin v. Doe (25-1083), Supreme Court.