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You guys know about vampires? … You know, vampires have no reflections in a mirror? There’s this idea that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. And what I’ve always thought isn’t that monsters don’t have reflections in a mirror. It’s that if you want to make a human being into a monster, deny them, at the cultural level, any reflection of themselves. And growing up, I felt like a monster in some ways. I didn’t see myself reflected at all. I was like, “Yo, is something wrong with me? That the whole society seems to think that people like me don’t exist?" And part of what inspired me, was this deep desire that before I died, I would make a couple of mirrors. That I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it.

- Junot Diaz

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If I ever write a picture book, it will be this one!

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A book is a safe place for a child to be sad.

Blurring the Lines

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Fear murals by Brian Rea

“This is an archive of some of the more interesting and unusual ones,” says Rea. “Where the intersection of fear, storytelling and drawing overlaps with people’s imagination.”

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The history of happiness is not simply about the description of unhappiness as the failure to be happy in the right way; it is also about the exclusion of the hap from happiness, as the exclusion of possibility and chance. I now think of queer movements as hap movements rather than happiness movements. It is not about the unhappy ones becoming the happy ones. Revolutionary forms of political consciousness involve heightening our awareness of just how much there is to be unhappy about. Yet this does not mean unhappiness becomes our political cause. In refusing to be constrained by happiness, we can open up other ways of being, of being perhaps.

Sara Ahmed - Happiness and Queer Politics

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Reteaching Gender and Sexuality (by Sid Jordan)

This.

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Reminder

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Janelle Monae - Tightrope ft. Big Boi

I don't know how she even manages to comment in five minutes on the construction (literal and metaphorical) of the intersections of madness, race, gender, history, fantasy, fear, self-awareness...

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Janelle Monae - Many Moons

This is a master class.

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This is a Character.

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When I'm 64

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We’re sorry. It’s not us. It’s the monster. The bank isn’t like a man. Yes, but the bank is only made of men. No, you’re wrong there–quite wrong there. The bank is something else than men. It happens that every man in a bank hates what the bank does, and yet the bank does it. The bank is something more than men, I tell you. It’s the monster. Men made it, but they can’t control it.

John Steinbeck, The Grapes of Wrath

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Wheatpasting on driftwood

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So pretension is a form of pretending, and pretending can be productive. I wouldn’t be the first to argue that the arts might provide a useful safe-zone for working things out. Brian Eno certainly beats me to the punch in his diary, A Year with Swollen Appendices (1996), when he writes: ‘I decided to turn the word “pretentious” into a compliment. The common assumption is that there are “real” people and there are others who are pretending to be something they’re not. There is also an assumption that there’s something morally wrong with pretending. My assumptions about culture as a place where you can take psychological risks without incurring physical penalties make me think that pretending is the most important thing we do. It’s the way we make our thought experiments, find out what it would be like to be otherwise.'

Frieze Magazine | Archive | Class Act

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We don't create a fantasy world to escape reality, we create it to be able to stay.

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Haarlem Oost is a branch library in the Netherlands that wanted to encourage visitors to add tags to the books they read. These tags would be added to the catalog to build a kind of recommendation system. To do this, they installed more book drops, labeled with descriptors like "boring," "great for kids," "funny," etc.

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P.O.S. - Optimist

My favorite local video from last year is a good start to the new one.