As I was introducing my photographs in the last Lightplay, I started thinking about the politics of abstract photography and the ways that the desert, in its bareness, can lend itself to seeming empty, untouched, unperturbed. Wrong ideas, all!

This reminded me of Richard Misrach’s incredible photographic work in the Nevada desert.

Bomb Crater and Destroyed Convoy, Bravo 20 Bombing Range, Nevada

As the Whitney Museum’s accompanying text explains,

For the Bravo 20 series, Misrach spent nearly two years in an isolated northwest corner of Nevada’s Great Basin desert, prompted by a recent discovery that the United States Navy had been illegally treating these public lands as a bombing range since 1952.

I love how these photographs tangle up aesthetics and beauty and politics, rightly making a big powerful ball of them. And how wild it must have felt for Misrach, tipped off by locals, to find the pit where the army was dumping radiation poisoned farm animals—and to find in these carcasses the makings of such a powerful piece of art.

Dead Animals #1

The ongoing destruction of the Washington Post is such a sick sign of the times. I canceled my subscription last March, and since then Jeff Bezos and his flunkies have only grown bolder in their gutting of the paper. I appreciated former Executive Editor Martin Baron’s statement after the complete destruction of the sports and books sections. He knows whereof he speaks when he writes:

The Post’s challenges, however, were made infinitely worse by ill-conceived decisions that came from the very top —from a gutless order to kill a presidential endorsement 11 days before the 2024 election to a remake of the editorial page that now stands out only for its moral infirmity. Loyal readers, livid as they saw owner Jeff Bezos betraying the values he was supposed to uphold, fled The Post. In truth, they were driven away, by the hundreds of thousands… Bezos’s sickening efforts to curry favor with President Trump have left an especially ugly stain of their own. This is a case study in near-instant, self-inflicted brand destruction.

(Found via Ruth Marcus’s excellent New Yorker piece, “How Jeff Bezos Brought Down the Washington Post”)

What is it that makes certain symbols and stories rise to the heights of ubiquity? And what is it that makes certain people adopt them as personal totems, or even, sometimes, as load-bearing parts of their personalities?

This Disney-era Star Wars odd couple—Mando and The Child—has certainly entered the canon. And I get it. The Child is cute! Heck, even my kid has a The Child plushie!

But doesn’t the pairing also have a weird, police state energy? The mask-always-on mercenary and the foundling. Dream-archetypes of violence and innocence, each needing the other to survive a cruel world. (And I know, I know, The Child ends up having superpowers.)

My point is: Raising Arizona it’s not. And it’s a bit intense to cover your car in it.

In case you aren’t paying attention to the ongoing and increasingly dystopian war against trans people, as of today—and with basically zero notice—all trans people in Kansas have had their driver’s licenses canceled. Per Erin Reed’s reporting, they’re being told to go to the state DMV and get new licenses showing their sex assigned at birth. This might sound like nothing more than a bureaucratic hassle, but it’s way more than that. It can lead straight to incarceration in a different-sex prison, and all the perils that entails:

The consequences for noncompliance could escalate quickly. Under Kansas law, driving without a valid license is a class B misdemeanor punishable by up to six months in jail and a $1,000 fine—though first-time offenders are more likely to face a citation and fine. A conviction, however, triggers an automatic 90-day license suspension. If a person drives during that suspension, they face a charge of driving on a suspended license, which carries a mandatory minimum of five days in jail. Kansas already requires county jails to house inmates by sex assigned at birth.

My favorite Minneapolitan, M Allen, finally wrote about the occupation, in a piece titled “conceal and carry” about “the weight of a gun in my hand.” The writing is quotable and sharp:

When I send my own dad the paper target, with a cluster of shots in the middle, he asks how it felt. Was I scared? Did I become suddenly more powerful? But it was like most heightened experiences, I watched myself less with feeling than to steady necessary breath. I watched myself divorced from myself, thinking not of a human I feared, but one I loved, and the word necessity. I think of the tools we have used to fight for each other throughout time, a stone, a guillotine, a gun.

There’s a weariness in this writing, together with a sense of resolve. M Allen writes that “The people who are dusty and bedraggled with this integrity, whose eyes are shiny with it, whose voices are hoarse, they are like beacons.”

The essay is ultimately about transformation—but not into an ice-cold shooter, rather into someone who knows that they will do what needs to be done to protect those they love. “It can’t only be me,” they write, “we looked around and saw fortitude in each other, saw strength and it awakened such a hunger to be alive, to be more than labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. To become beacons ourselves.”

Labor, rent, and the harvesting of our attention. What a damning survey of what our society gives us. I’m hungry to be more than that, too.

M Allen’s writing glows with the intensity and purpose of months on the ground, resisting violent fascism—not an experience one would ever ask for, but clearly an intense and meaningful and even transformative experience nonetheless.

(This piece made me think about an argument I had with a loved one after my note on “diversity of tactics”. He encouraged me to change tack and instead call out and shun any violent acts by folks I otherwise agree with. He said I should not just practice nonviolence as a tactic but actively be “anti-violence.” I see where this view is coming from and can even admire it, but by my lights, moral absolutism is no fit for our time of ascendant fascism. Just as there’s a paradox of tolerance, I see a paradox of nonviolence. If your opponent can and does murder protesters and observers in broad daylight, with impunity, it’s clear that the space for nonviolent resistance is being constrained. I’m not saying give up on nonviolence as a tactic—not at all!—but I am saying I can understand why M Allen and their friends are learning to use guns. Pacifism as a virtue above all others is a dead end.)

How have I never seen these amber snails with Green-banded Broodsacs in their eyes before?

Bryan Pfeiffer wrote about them, and that’s his video I clipped, but I found out about them through an interview with Pfeiffer on the lovely podcast Rumble Strip: Episode #309 - Zombie Snails. I love Pfeiffer’s conversation with host Erica Heilman. In particular, I love the contrast between the guest, a wonder-filled biologist, and the deadpan humor of the host.

“And [birds] pluck the pulsing blue broodsac out of the snail’s eye socket,” says Pfeiffer.

“Oh,” says Heilman, “So now it’s even Oedipal.”

This weekend we visited a dear friend who I am connected with because she and my mother-in-law befriended each other in their early twenties. We’ve stayed with our friend many times—she’s a great and generous host—and one of the incredible things about staying with her is that she has lived in her same beautiful house for my partner’s entire life. Each visit is also a return.

On this visit, I took my child out to the back yard and showed him the orchids. These orchids were given to our friend as a housewarming present by my child’s great-grandmother, half a century ago.

What are we planting today that might bloom and keep blooming, decades from now?

In these days, I think it’s important not to look away from death, grief, and transformation. So I was delighted to get to engage in a wide-ranging podcast interview with Kriss Kevorkian, a thanatologist who holds the distinction of having invented the term “Environmental Grief.” I wrote in my blurb for the episode that “Kriss talks about thanatology, her own work on behalf of the Southern Resident Orcas in the Salish Sea, and how we can harness environmental grief to act on behalf of the non-human world.” A rich vein of thought, and one we don’t discuss enough.

When you ferment, you want things to get funky, but not too funky. Since last time we checked in on the sauerkraut and the pineapple vinegar, each had a moment of seeming like all was lost.

With the sauerkraut, one day I checked on it and found that the water level had fallen far enough that a layer of cabbage was no longer submerged. And this layer was developing a suspicious white mold. Oh no! I carefully removed the weights and then even more carefully removed all of the bad cabbage, erring hard on the side of removing too much. Then I carefully cleaned the sides of the crock with paper towels, scrubbed the weights with soap and hot water, and added more brine. I packed it all up and set it back on the shelf, worried that the mold would re-appear and I would have to discard the whole batch. But the mold never came back, and another week later I tasted the remaining kraut. No off flavors, no sense that anything had gone wrong. Instead, just deliciously sour sauerkraut.

With the vinegar, I strained out the chunks of pineapple skin after a week, leaving a cloudy liquid. It first turned to wine (it tasted sharp and wild), then started developing lacy white foam on top. I worried this meant it was somehow infected, so I carefully skimmed it all out. Then I realized: doesn’t vinegar need to grow a “mother” to really ferment? So I stopped skimming, and sure enough it grew a leathery little layer of bacteria and yeast on top—and shortly thereafter it started tasting like—you guessed it—vinegar. Strongly pineapple-scented, wonderfully funky (in a good way) vinegar.

This was my first time making my own vinegar. I found it empowering, getting to track the process from beginning to end. Previously, vinegar was just something I found in the condiment aisle at the grocery store. Now I know how it’s made. The simple mystery (where does vinegar come from?) has been replaced by deeper mysteries (what’s really happening in there? what makes great vinegar great? what else can I transform like this?).

Related: an account of evolving tactics in “Fighting for the future in occupied Minneapolis” by Pranay Somayajula. Loved this bit in particular:

My comrades and I often make reference to the idea of “developing mass protagonism,” a concept with roots in Latin American Marxist thought that expresses an understanding that successful organizing means helping people see themselves not merely as passive subjects of history, but as active agents with the collective power to bring about revolutionary transformation. I have become increasingly convinced that rather than asking people what radicalized them — a familiar question for anyone who has spent time in left activist circles — a better query would be: what protagonized you? Over the last several weeks, whether or not they realize it yet, thousands of people across Minnesota have found an answer to that question.

One of the great tricks of late-stage capitalism is to convince the mass of us humans that we are powerless in the face of the machinery of state power and capital. But in fact it is nothing more than our collective decision to believe in authority and numbers in a ledger that allows these systems to persevere! As Ursula K. Le Guin famously said,

Hard times are coming, when we’ll be wanting the voices of writers who can see alternatives to how we live now, can see through our fear-stricken society and its obsessive technologies to other ways of being, and even imagine real grounds for hope. We’ll need writers who can remember freedom—poets, visionaries—realists of a larger reality… We live in capitalism, its power seems inescapable—but then, so did the divine right of kings. Any human power can be resisted and changed by human beings. Resistance and change often begin in art. Very often in our art, the art of words.

Another way I like to feel connected to other people is to root for a sports team. Being a fan means sometimes giving yourself over to ecstatic celebration, other times sharing in a collective sorrow. If you do it right, you care inordinately about a game defined by arbitrary rules, played by people you’ll likely never meet. The key is doing it together.

As a fan of the Golden State Warriors, the past decade has given me plenty of sports nirvana (four rings!) but also some gutting setbacks (Durant’s Achilles tear, Klay’s ACL tear, Draymond’s nut-shot and punch, James Wiseman, etc.). I’ve shared all of these ups and downs with my brother, with my partner, and also with the writers and commenters on the many fan-blogs I follow. Whenever a big piece of Warriors news comes out, I’m immediately curious how other people reacted, what they thought, how they felt.

Two weeks ago, our second superstar, Jimmy Butler, (for whom I was ecstatic that the Warriors traded) tore his ACL. This has mostly sunk our chances to make the playoffs, let alone win a championship, this season. And with Greatest Warrior of All Time Steph Curry now 37 years old, it may mean the end of what has been a glorious run.

To process this, I of course turned to my two favorite blogs: Golden State of Mind and Dub Nation HQ. There was plenty of openhearted, thoughtful writing in both the blog posts and the comments. I especially appreciated this meditation by a guest blogger named Riley Gaucher. Gaucher writes openly about their own tendency to be a fair-weather fan, riveted when the team is winning and tuning out when they suck. (Honestly, same.) This leads them to some deep places:

Mortality. For me, watching athletes get injured always makes me confront my mortality. If this whimsical escapism with wholly artificial meaning can be threatened by reality, what does that say about my real-world life? And what is the point of giving so much of my time and energy and hope to something that hurts so bad and now seems so hopeless? Without any realistic chance to compete, how do I keep the same passion for this team and sport? Will I be able to defeat my fair-weather tendencies or will I let the Warriors be a smaller part of my life now?

A week after Butler’s injury, the Warriors’ plans were again thrown in disarray—but this time it was because of our increasingly fascist moment. They were scheduled to play an away game against the Minnesota Timberwolves the same day that federal agents murdered Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. The league ended up postponing the game by a day.

This was a small disruption, in the scheme of things. But not knowing what else to do, I checked the sports blogs. And I found that the post about the postponement was offering a vital space for the site’s regular commenters to share their grief and fear.

One comment in particular struck me as one of the smartest, and scariest, warnings I’ve seen about the wave of authoritarianism that’s currently breaking against our political system and communities and neighbors’ bodies. It came from the commenter ScottWarrior, whose comments I’m very familiar with. ScottWarrior posts on Golden State of Mind after almost every game. He’s opinionated, informed, and verbose. He often engages in back-and-forths with other commenters, engaging in spirited conversations about which players deserve more or less playing time, coaching decisions, moments that swung the game, etc. I always appreciate reading what he has to say. So I was interested to know what he would say here.

The whole comment is worth reading. It offers the perspective of an emigré from an authoritarian state—Belarus—discussing how that regime operates and answering the question “How does it work so that the people of Belarus can’t get rid of him for so long?” The part that most interested me was about how the security services work:

At 18, the male half ends up going to the army instead. All male population has a compulsory 2 year army service. What do they do after that? The options are going back home, stay in the army in some capacity or get a job with police. Police and army are the top priorities by the dictator. He builds free accommodation for them in the cities (get a job - get a flat in the capital), pays top salaries, have their retirement age at 45 y.o., etc. No special skills is needed and any village boy can have an above average life in a city. But the most important thing is that no matter what the policemen do, the dictator never throws them under the bus. They kill opposition leaders on his behalf, kill protesters on streets or torture thousands of them in prisons, but they know one thing for sure - as long as he is in power, they won’t be ever brought to justice (the court is under his control too, obviously). Per capita, we have 10 times more police than the neighbouring Poland. Dictatorship always needs armed protection by loyal forces.

Protests have no chance because it is always unarmed people, a lot of them, against armed police and sometimes army. For the protest to have a chance, one needs at least a small part of armed people, police or army, to change sides or at least refuse shooting people, but it doesn’t happen. It doesn’t happen because the police is part of the regime. You overthrow the regime and 90% of them would lose their jobs. They know it and they also know that they don’t know how to do anything else to get another job. For some, mostly the top officers, the situation is even worse as they would get to prison for what they have previously done as part of the system.

This is bleak stuff, and I feel real sorrow especially for the people of Belarus. It also feels crazy to find some of the more coherent political analysis going down in the comments of a basketball fan blog. But then why would that be so crazy? Community is where you find it, and we can find our best comrades in our regular haunts.

We went to see Fuzz play a rare hometown show at the Bellwether. In response to their technically hypercompetent, psychedelia-inflected punk stylings, the crowd exuberantly moshed and crowdsurfed. With everything happening out in the world, it felt good to be out with everyone else, earplugs in, rubbing shoulders together, all moving with the music.

(Also, check out Ty Segall’s kick drum. More of this, please!)

Lisa has been wearing this t-shirt for a decade now:

Over the weekend, the kid asked what it was a picture of, and we both realized that we didn’t know. Was it the silhouette of a real portable library or was it just a fantasy of one, à la Moose’s Book Bus? Lisa had been following Feminist Library on Wheels on Instagram for many years but had never seen a picture of anything that looked like this glorious, bike-core contraption. So we scrolled back and back and back—and found the sacred machine!

Vincent Poturica writes in to share his own encounter with a tiny book, which happened to coincide with reading my essay on “The Zen of Tiny Books”:

I’m in NYC and, yesterday at The Cloisters, took a couple pics of an astounding, tiny prayer book (from a Dutch Middle Age artist) that moved me to tears.

This “diminutive Book of Hours” was made by Simon Bening circa 1530-1535. It measures about 2½ by 2 inches. The catalog text goes hard on its enchanting tininess:

It was a reminder of the omnipresence of God, meant to be attached to its owner, or stored with precious possessions. There is a special magic achieved by Bening’s exceptional skill at creating a miniature world. The miniatures follow standard convention, but Bening consistently tweaks the presentation, making this manuscript exceptionally poignant and affecting.

I wish I was in New York…I’d go visit this book that so moved Vincent!

The most hopeful thing I read this week was an account from a Minneapolis resident, Winston Hearn, of the mutual aid networks and bravery and love breaking out across the Twin Cities, despite it all. I loved this description of patrols and attempts to disrupt ICE (and I watched the linked video at least five times):

There are patrols in every neighborhood, at every school, watching for the unmarked cars that suggest the paramilitary terrorists are coming. Those patrols are supported by people who can check tags, relay information, track in real time through trusted networks. When ICE agents get brave enough to step out of their cars, the community swarms to make their jobs difficult. Here is a video with no violence that shows just how this works. People materialize to witness, to confuse, to chase off. To protect everyone that they can.

Here are two terms that help me as I try to make sense of The National Political Scene™ in this dark hour:

I. Diversity of Tactics

This concept says that we are all in charge of our own actions and those tactics that we are comfortable with, but we should as much as we can refrain from criticizing the tactics of those with whom we share concerns and goals. For instance, I personally am deeply committed to nonviolence and will not engage in property destruction—but I refuse to spend my voice and energy denouncing the protesters who burned down a police substation in Minneapolis in the wake of George Floyd’s murder. Here’s Malcolm X (via Wikipedia) explaining the reasoning behind diversity of tactics:

Our people have made the mistake of confusing the methods with the objectives. As long as we agree on objectives, we should never fall out with each other just because we believe in different methods or tactics or strategy to reach a common goal.

Imagine if Martin Luther King, Jr. had spent significant time criticizing Malcolm X and the Black Panthers because of their more militant tactics. He would have played right into the hands of the racist, segregationist right. And without more militant actors making King’s nonviolence seem reasonable and like a decent compromise, we might never have had the Civil Rights Acts.

Now look at this headline and framing from the New York Times:

This kind of hand-wringing and scolding of the left plays directly into the hands of the fascists! How in the ever-loving world do you think centrist Democrats might have the chance “to rein in the agency” if not by having this position seem like the reasonable, compromise in contrast to the vehemence and moral clarity of the “Abolish ICE” crowd. This compulsive criticism of the left is itself a bad tactic, and one that takes pressure off of the very agency (ICE) that these “Democratic Critics” are supposedly critical of.

David Graeber has a wonderful explanation the necessity of embracing a diversity of tactics—and the danger of trying to police others’ tactics—in his short essay “Concerning the violent peace-police”:

Successful movements have understood that it’s absolutely essential not to fall into the trap set out by the authorities and spend one’s time condemning and attempting to police other activists. One makes one’s own principles clear. One expresses what solidarity one can with others who share the same struggle, and if one cannot, tries one’s best to ignore or avoid them, but above all, one keeps the focus on the actual source of violence, without doing or saying anything that might seem to justify that violence because of tactical disagreements you have with fellow activists.

II. Police Riot

This term describes a confrontation between police and civilians in which the police are the ones inciting, escalating, and sustaining violence. I learned this term during the George Floyd protests in 2020, and I wrote about it then:

[P]olice have committed many of the signal violent acts of the last week-and-a-half. Perhaps nowhere has this been clearer than when military police gassed and assault[ed] peaceful protesters in D.C.’s Lafayette Square so that our president could have his picture taken holding up a Bible like 12-pound salmon. But here in Los Angeles we have also had incidents of police intentionally ramming protesters with their cars, clubbing peaceful protesters, and even smashing out windows to drag people out of their cars for the crime of driving after curfew.

The past is prologue. Today in Minneapolis ICE agents act more as occupying militia than as police. And boy do they love shattering windshields and dragging people out of their cars. The violence and spectacle and provocation are the point. Here’s Lydia Polgreen reporting what it was like to actually go to her hometown and see the occupation firsthand:

From afar, this tragic and possibly criminal act of violence could plausibly be seen as incidental to President Trump’s mission to deport undocumented people from the country. But when I landed in Minneapolis on Monday and saw the size, scope and lawlessness of the federal onslaught unfolding here, I understood that Good’s killing was emblematic of its true mission: to stage a spectacle of cruelty upon a city that stands in stark defiance against Trump’s dark vision of America.

The brutality is the point. A police riot seeks to create the conditions of violence and lawlessness that, by a certain logic, call for further police to be deployed. They create the conditions of their own necessity. (Or for the invocation of the Insurrection Act.)

Pursuant to making print objects, last year I took on a handful of freelance print design projects: four full-length books, two academic reports, a conference program, and an album jacket. I love print design: I love how this work often puts me into a non-verbal trance state, I love the challenge of presenting someone else’s work in the best way possible, and I love how collaborative the design process can (and I think should) be. I rarely feel too possessive of a specific layout, because the final product, when you’re doing it right, has been arrived at mostly through conversation and consensus.

Anyways, I bring this all up to share that I recently found a new and wonderful resource: the ongoing “Best Book Covers” series written by Emily Temple for Literary Hub. Each year she asks about 50 book designers to share their favorite cover designs of the year, and then she ranks them on the basis of which covers were mentioned the most—and she includes the designer-judges’ comments. So much good stuff.

Reports of the revival of print media get louder by the day. Soon we’ll have a trend piece in the_New York Times_and that’s how we’ll know it’s over and we can all go back to our phones. Until then, I thought I would share some notable developments from the artists and writers I follow:

• Sarah McColl’s beloved email newsletter, Lost Art, is folding up shop and being reborn as Paper Choir, a 4x / year mailing “of various risograph ephemera (zines, recipes, notecards, illustrated diaries, stickers, collaborative texts, posters, postcards, broadsides, etc.)” Can’t wait to get the first mailing in March! 
• The poet Annelyse Gelman just sent out a call to her mailing list: “Are you sick of email? Me too. I am doing SNAIL MAIL instead and have written a zine, ART SCHOOL REPORT #1, which I would be happy to send to you for free. It’s about Clown, Internal Family Systems, & other stuff.” (By the way, Annelyse’s website is sooooo good, strong multiverse.plus vibes.) 
• I just received my first copy of the relatively new and extremely gay poetry magazine & Change. I subscribed after reading Xander Beattie’s interview with publisher Kevin Bertolero. The subscription is just $3 per issue. As Kevin explains, 

“That fee covers the cost of printing each issue (usually somewhere around $1.50 per copy), and then $0.10 for the envelope, and $1.36 for the stamp. The format of the issue is actually the way it is (including choice of paper stock) so that each issue will weigh under 3 oz, which means it can be mailed through USPS as a letter.”

• Robin Sloan sent three zines through the mail last year. I loved receiving them, these beautiful two-tone risoprints on A3 paper, tri-folded so that they fit in a 6x9” booklet envelope. In December he sent out an issue of his newsletter with links to six new, Bay Area-based print outlets, and explained, “… you have to understand, Bay Area media has felt, at times, shockingly thin. This is an embarrassment of riches.” 
• The tech journalism website The Verge even published a zine, Content Goblins. I had sticker shock for the shipping ($10.74 on a $20 zine), but went ahead and ordered it. The design is excellent, but the content is more magazine than zine—the articles are simply high-quality The Verge articles. I don’t think I’d buy a second edition. 

I have been plotting my own entry into this space, ever since I got a new printer for my birthday back in 2024. Among many experiments over the last 18 months, I made a zine for this year’sholiday card. More to come soon—from me, and apparently from everyone else, too. I say, the more the merrier! |