Larry Bell, "Iceberg and its Shadow" (1975)

Only built for internet linx

1. Consumerism fascinates me but on a baser level I also just fucking love The Mall. Walking in air-conditioned circles past Cinnabon stands and palm oases sipping a Jamba Juice is an extremely pleasurable experience for me. As such I will read any and every article about RETAIL EXPERIENCE, especially if it has to do with Los Angeles, the land of my birth. Here's part one, two, and three of KCET's excellent series on the history of how we've shopped in Southern California
2. Another thing about malls! This one's about dead malls (ghost malls?)
3. Earl Sweatshirt interviewed Mike Tyson, who is basically my mom ("In order to be a friend to anybody, you have to a friend to yourself"). Guess which one is a fan of The Notebook, though.
4. "Under a regime of visibility that usurps older notions of substance, what figures can we use to affirm its surface effects, to understand its refractive powers, to crack open its hidden energies and make its calculus work for us and not against us? How has this new superficiality realized and flipped the politics of spectacle described by Debord? And why should we take a closer look at the sun?" 
5. A map of Los Angeles County's annexations and detachments with dates, ooh ahh
6. I need Phaidon's Cookbook Book
7. "He sports a John Cena t-shirt and introduces himself as Mohamed Al Shishkebabi" - Egyptian hot dog vendors in NYC
8. At 11:38 am 11% of men and 33% of "nonemployed" women are doing housework
9. Here's that PDF of Barthes' A Lover's Discourse you were probably looking for
10. In case you missed it (and you probably did): the NAACP building in Colorado was bombed and The News seriously slacked off with their reporting of it. Everything is and always will be the worst
11. BONUS LINK: THIS MALL SHIT IS NOT A GAME

Enzo Mari

In season: January

Asparagus
Avocados
Beets
Broccoli
Cabbage
Carambola
Cauliflower
Celery
Chard
Cherimoyas
Citrus:

  Blood Orange,

  Grapefruit,

  Kumquats,
  Lemons,

  Navel Oranges,
  Tangelos/Tangerines 

Dates, Medjool
Kale
Kohlrabi
Mushroom
Mustard
Onion, Green
Passion Fruit
Peas, Green
Strawberries

GONNA CATCH THESE HANDS: Rochas Pre-Fall 2015

Philip Whalen, "Something Nice About Myself"

Lots of people who no longer love each other
Keep on loving me
& I

I make myself rarely available

Don't worry if I write rhymes, I write checks

Jonas Wood, "Studio Bathroom" (2009)

I wish I knew how it would feel to be free

With the disappointingly predictable grand jury decisions concerning the deaths of Michael Brown and Eric Garner, these past two weeks have been trying, to say the least - there have been a lot of tears and a lot of outrage, but mostly, a lot of questions. It is undeniably maddening to live in a country - hell, a world - where not only your life but the lives of your mother, your father, your brothers, your sisters, and anyone who shares your skin color or looks like they are related to someone who does have so little value. How best to carry on? If I have children, they will be black. How can I bring them into a world that people and the institutions they serve are determined to remove them from? I’m ever grateful to my parents for teaching me how to dodge the figurative bullets of a white supremacist society - the inferiority complex that arises when constantly treated as though you are inherently less than, being bullied into silence or complacency, and buying into the belief that “white is right,” to name a few - but how to teach a child how to dodge literal bullets? As Ijeoma Oluo outlined in a devastating string of tweets, it seems as though there’s not much one can do as a black person to avoid it. What can we do? I haven’t figured this out quite yet. With the recent news of yet another unarmed black man killed by a police officer, we need to work on solutions to this problem urgently. This section from James Baldwin’s “Notes of a Native Son,” which I posted on Facebook last week following the Ferguson grand jury decision, bears reposting because it’s a good place for us to start:

"It began to seem that one would have to hold in the mind forever two ideas which seemed to be in opposition. The first idea was acceptance, the acceptance, totally without rancor, of life as it is, and men as they are: in the light of this idea, it goes without saying that injustice is a commonplace. But this did not mean that one could be complacent, for the second idea was of equal power: that one must never, in one’s own life, accept these injustices as commonplace but must fight them with all one’s strength."

"The moon is feminist art"