The Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Carports

Photo by Paul Redmond.

Only built for internet linx

1. I recently watched a talk between Arthur Jafa and bell hooks wherein Jafa says that cameras, regardless of the race of their operators, function as surrogates for the white gaze. This was bumping around in the back of my mind as I read this week's Race/Related newsletter, which features a conversation between NYT photo editor Sandra Stevenson and Harvard professor and Aperture guest editor Sarah Lewis on black representation in photography. In light of Jafa's statement, is it any surprise that film photography is rife with racial bias on an operational level?

2. Try reading all of the quotes in this article about Pitti Uomo without throwing your computer out the window. It's really hard!

3. Must-reads on the state of education, discrimination, inequality, and the "surrendering of advantage" in America: Nikole Hannah-Jones' heartbreaking piece on school segregation in New York City and Jia Tolentino on the recently decided Abigail Fisher case.

4. Ludacris is having a concert at Guantanamo Bay on the 4th of July.

5. "Álgos (longing) is what we share, yet nóstos (the return home) is what divides us. It is the promise to rebuild the ideal home that lies at the core of many powerful ideologies of today, tempting us to relinquish critical thinking for emotional bonding. The danger of nostalgia is that it tends to confuse the actual home with an imaginary one. In extreme cases, it can create a phantom homeland, for the sake of which one is ready to die or kill. Unelected nostalgia breeds monsters."

6. Delete your account.

7. "Denouncing a view or person as racist is easy but trying to reestablish links between left wing parties, movements and white working class communities is the harder job": on Brexit and "when being racist doesn't matter." UPDATE 7/2: London Review of Books contributors looking back and looking forward on the Leave vote.

8. I don't have much to say about Fanta Sylla's Black Film Critic Syllabus except that it's perfect.

9. "What is required now of architecture, especially academic architecture, is not another retreading of the usual antagonisms. Resipsa loquitur: The boring and never-ending Facebook-adjacent arguments around this year’s Venice Architecture Biennale are primarily about mindless parametricist fundamentalism versus patronizing do-gooder fundamentalism. Who cares? Only the difficulty of real adversarial engagement, not fantasy critiques launched from the ivory tower at the profession, will further the conversation. Architecture will not advance one step as either a symbol of the one percent or as a tool of the other 99 percent; it must adapt and grow beyond its currently servile relationships with capital and/or community. What is required is nothing less than a wholesale attack on the discipline’s stagnating orthodoxies, left and right." Peter Zellner going all the way in on the failures of the traveling House Housing: An Untimely History of Architecture and Real Estate exhibit (whose Los Angeles arrival I was [unfortunately?] out of town for) is everything. The housing crisis will not be solved with more "brutalist" event websites and intellectually lazy panel discussions.

10. Anyway! Craft beer sucks and Jon Taffer agrees with me, so.

Bonus: I'm always thinking about the mall and thinking about different ways to think about the mall which often leads me to find things like this, a long but worthwhile paper on programmed music in shopping centers, which of course means I also have to remind everyone of these K-Mart bangers from the early 90s.

Mother's Little Helper

I'm not in New York right now, but if I were I'd check out Diamond Stingily at Queer Thoughts before it closed on the 19th.

Frank O'Hara, "At the Old Place"

Joe is restless and so am I, so restless.
Button’s buddy lips frame “L G T TH O P?”
across the bar.  “Yes!” I cry, for dancing’s
my soul delight.  (Feet! feet!) “Come on!”

Through the streets we skip like swallows.
Howard malingers.  (Come on, Howard.) Ashes
malingers.  (Come on, J.A.)  Dick malingers.
(Come on, Dick.)  Alvin darts ahead. (Wait up,
Alvin.)  Jack, Earl and Someone don’t come.

Down the dark stairs drifts the steaming cha-
cha-cha.  Through the urine and smoke we charge
to the floor.  Wrapped in Ashes’ arms I glide.

(It’s heaven!)  Button lindys with me. (It’s
heaven!) Joe’s two-steps, too, are incredible,
and then a fast rhumba with Alvin, like skipping
on toothpicks.  And the interminable intermissions,

we have them.  Jack, Earl and Someone drift
guiltily in. “I knew they were gay
the minute I laid eyes on them!” screams John.
How ashamed they are of us!   we hope.

---

Lifted from Andrew Epstein's post on the Orlando massacre, Frank O'Hara, and the legacy of gay nightclubs.

SALVE NARCISO NEGRO

Curly Myrick, "It Be's That Way"

It do.  (Shout out to Kenswil!)

(One day I'll post something on this blog aside from links and songs but honestly I don't even know what I'm doing with this thing. You know what, though? IT BE'S THAT WAY.)

Only built for internet linx

1. "Farming simulators placate a need for a collective and organized past as an alternative to contemporary chaos." WOW @ ME NEXT TIME. Speaking of black farmers: they (we tbh) out here.

2. In defense of cliques.

3. Nicholas Hume-Brown at Slate rolls up his sleeves and digs into AllRecipes - apparently the world's most popular English-language food website - and makes a condescension-free broccoli & cheese casserole.

4. While walking through a village on the east coast of England this past winter, I thought of Southern California. It wasn't a palm tree or a free-range chia seed pudding what done it, but rather a low-slung bungalow with a wide, green lawn. With California in the midst of a housing crisis (to say nothing of our water situation), what will become of one California's most enduring icons, the single-family bungalow?

5. "Those black people who make their way into the business are heavily concentrated in stereotypical roles. This has meant sport, entertainment and especially what is euphemistically called urban affairs, often meaning reporting on black people. By contrast, there are very few black journalists writing about politics and national security, international news, big business, culture (as opposed to entertainment) or science and technology – they are essentially absent from large swaths of coverage, and even more sparsely represented among the ranks of editors. This is not a trivial matter, or a subject of concern solely to journalists: the overwhelming whiteness of the media strongly but silently conditions how Americans understand their own country and the rest of the world."

6. Some fun media shade: Politico going in on Salon (featuring Glenn Greenwald doing what he does: tying every-fucking-thing back to Hillary Clinton and her intergalactic Eileen Fisher car coats or whatever).

7. I just discovered an excellent podcast called Racist Sandwich, wherein "chef Soleil Ho and journalist Zahir Janmohamed interview chefs and purveyors of color and tackle food's relationship to race, gender, and class." Their name comes from an incident which gave me one of my favorite images found on the internet (see above) and you can listen to their first episode - featuring Bertony Faustin, Oregon's first black winemaker - here.

8. Remnants of Los Angeles' Little Italy.

9. Vice Dean of the Committee on Strategic Alumni Technology, Estimated salary: $294,664

10. "'All these newspapers used to have foreign bureaus,' he said. 'Now they don’t. They call us to explain to them what’s happening in Moscow and Cairo. Most of the outlets are reporting on world events from Washington. The average reporter we talk to is 27 years old, and their only reporting experience consists of being around political campaigns. That’s a sea change. They literally know nothing.'"

My tippet – only tulle –

The internet floated an oldish Claudia Rankine interview my way last week and in it she mentions that the first poem she ever learned was "Because I Could Not Stop for Death" and I'm feeling very YAS.gif about it

Had we our senses

In this short life / that only merely lasts an hour / How much - how / little - is / within our / power

There are those / who are shallow / intentionally / and only / profound / by / accident

As there are / apartments in our / own minds that / we never enter / without apology / we should respect / the seals of / others

If you can't tell by some of my recent posts, I've been slowly, tentatively revisiting writers I loved when I was younger. My mother had a book of Emily Dickinson's collected poetry and every now and again while snooping around her room I'd take the book from the shelf and read a randomly chosen poem. I didn't "get" any of it at the time, but later, in high school, I'd read her poems and feel the air rushing out of my lungs. To close out what I guess is National Poetry Month in the U.S., here's a few of her envelope flap poems which have been collected in The Gorgeous Nothings.

Only built for internet linx

1. To start, here’s a bunch of things that I would file under, “Food - it’s complicated”: Matt Hartman on consuming the “New South”; Serena Dai on food colonialism and when notions of food poisoning are racist; Food & Wine magazine has named its first Black Best New Chef, Seattle’s Edouardo Jordan; this First We Feast article on the problem with rap being played in restaurants (you already know how I feel) touches on some interesting points even though it largely misses the mark for me (Gee isn’t rap music LOUD?! Like, too loud for FINE DINING?!), but their roundtable on the state of soul food was great; you can now order Taco Bell via Slack; pomegranatesssssssssssss; I'm tired of explaining to people that it's highly, highly unlikely that they've eaten authentic Kobe beef in America (shout out to a former co-worker who tried to argue that Umami Burger's nine dollar ass burgers were made from a Kobe beef blend); I really enjoyed Pelin Keskin's Cooking in America episode on Uzbek food; Chinese culture without Chinese people; hierarchies of taste, hierarchies of interest, and how Americans pretend to be into "ethnic food"; and lastly, because I'm obsessed with what politicians eat, I enjoyed this Bernie Sanders profile. TRIGGER WARNING: contains the words "millennial-friendly blueberry smoothie" just sitting on the page together being annoying.

2. "Lumpen proletarian in the class society of appearances": Hito Stereyl on shitpics

3. I was too indie to shop at Kitson (even though I lived nearby and frequented the also-shuttered WESC store across the street from their Robertson Blvd location), but I appreciate it as a fixture of my Los Angeles girlhood, however removed from it I was ideologically. Philippa Snow offers a eulogy of sorts at Vestoj.

4. "I want to feel what I feel. What's mine. Even if it's not happiness, whatever that means. Because you're all you've got."

5. "Using [the sociologist Pierre] Bourdieu’s theory of distinction, I studied dogs as a new social marker. Dog ownership is a way of appropriating public space. Firstly, because you have to walk dogs and secondly, because they make you feel safe in the neighbourhood. Dog ownership is a way of inscribing very specific social norms onto public space. So I look at the way dog owners really use their dogs, not in a conscious way, to signal their socio-economic status. Like having a certain kind of dog, not those 'ghetto' dogs, but rather by owning poodles or Labradors. They buy accessories for their dogs and go to dog bakeries. These social activities are used to create a new lifestyle and new way of consolidating social bonds."

6. You've probably read David Remnick's home run Aretha Franklin profile already, right? Right???

7. "When vigilance becomes a game, the dangers posed by injustice begin to feel arbitrary. The Woke Olympics, in turn, operates both as sport and false consciousness, championed by the faulty belief that eradication is the natural result of recognizing hate’s existence."

8. This article on the "weird teens" of Tumblr exposed me to the world of One Direction-President Obama slashfic ("a love room with a love bed").

9. Why does L.A. insist on wasting time and money addressing non-issues? We don't have the man-spreading problem on public transportation that New York seems to have. You know who takes up extra seats on the bus? People who can't afford to transport their shit any other way. I'm pretty sure they won't have a spare $100 for this dumb ass ticket, either. As for the people who put their regular-sized purses and backpacks in adjoining seats, that's nothing a finger pointed at the seat coupled with "Can I sit here?" won't fix. Proposing a whole ass law because people don't know how to speak up is ridiculous to me, especially because I can guarantee a certain kind of person won't be getting these tickets.

10. "The formulation has been diluted to something representational and bloodless — an architectural rendering of a building that will never be built." Jia Tolentino on the commodification of "empowerment."

Bonus: automating emotional labor via Chrome extensions

But also: "Let’s get rid of the 'I' in fiction and memoir too. If that means no more fiction and memoir, well, it is a small price to pay to make all those people who think they are too highly refined and emotionally gifted stop talking about themselves for just a few minutes, and if you’re going to tell me that I’m using the personal pronoun an awful lot in this piece decrying it, well, oh my God, what an amazing point you raise, I never thought of that."