One of the strategies I'm employing this year to counter reliance on social media is to subscribe to more email newsletters and read them — and to read, to completion, more of the articles I click off social media posts.
Even in this pursuit, I still keep winding up with a stacked tabs bar, and I don't know about you but there comes a point where that tabs bar starts filling me with deep dread — a persistent visual reminder of this weeks best of intentions unfulfilled. What's in there? Ongoing research? Stalled projects I forgot about? A chat session where I left someone on read?
Rather than simply succumbing to the forced amnesia of a closed/crashed browser, from time to time I'll share some of those languishing links in a roundup post — and here's what I've been looking at in late January.
In no particular order:
Warren Zevon & the Art of Dying (Rolling Stone, Nov. 2002, archived at Wayback Machine)
I found out this month that Warren Zevon was raised Mormon, which surprised me since, due to childhood trauma, I tend to keep close tabs on who is and who used to be Mormon. It was Zevon's birthday a few days ago, and I've been listening to him a lot lately anyway, so I guess he's kind of haunting me. This Mormon detail was revealed in this great, late interview with Zevon.
"I always thought old age would be a good subject for rock & roll. If you thought Neil Young and I were mad about being young, wait till you hear how mad we are about being old and decrepit."
The Three Hearts of Beauty Pill’s Chad Clark (Rolling Stone, Jan. 2023)
Another Rolling Stone story about a phenomenal musician navigating health issues, this time a current report on Chad Clark of Beauty Pill, whose work is a relatively recent and delightful discovery for me.
And how do I relate to this realization:
“Everything I do for the rest of my life is gonna be a risk.”
Kory Grow
Sarah Michelle Gellar Returns to Fighting Form (Hollywood Reporter, Jan 2023)
Another thing I can relate to: it really sucks when the thing they know you for makes you die a little inside.
“I’ll never tell my full story because I don’t get anything out of it. I’ve said all I’m going to say because nobody wins. Everybody loses.”
Mikey O’Connell
Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids? (Indignity Vol. 3, No. 6)
It's exhausting keeping up with the anti-trans moral panic media barrage, and yet if I make a claim to a skeptic that the Times and the Atlantic have become willing and enthusiastic participants in this panic, it's usually on my shoulders to aggregate the proof and argue the point like it was a couple of months ago when the local newspaper decided to advance transphobia via one of its own in-house op ed reactionaries and then offer up a weak apology after public outcry. Aggregation and analysis like this from Tom Scocca is crucial and incredibly helpful to the work at hand, and are what I'd expect from a newspaper employing, you know, reporters.
Tom Scocca
The Velvet Underground at UMBC, 1969
Back in 2010 UMBC Magazine posted some images from this event, which happened just before I was born. This led me to discover that Chicago played at UMBC on the day I was born.
Using Kid Pix to Recreate Caravaggio's "Judith Beheading Holofornes" (Cat Graffam, Jan 2023)
I'll be teaching this in my Art & Technology class this semester; it's just so good.
Party Like It’s 1959 (NYT, Jan 2023)
On the revival of Robert Whitman’s “American Moon” this month. Really wish I could afford to get up to NYC for things like this.
Art Outside: A New Exhibit Puts the Work of Several Baltimore Artists on a Stretch of North Howard Street (Baltimore Beat, Jan 2023)
A piece by Teri Henderson on the public artworks lining Howard Street of late, brought to the city thanks to the efforts of Current Space. Looking forward to taking a walk downtown to see these pieces.
Teri Henderson
From Junk Drawers to Phone Books, Artist Bernie Kaminski Captures the Nostalgia of Banal Items Through Papier-Mâché (Colossal, Jan 2023)
This is delightful to me.
Grace Ebert
Introducing the science of Qallunology (Windspeaker, 2006 via ammsa.com)
Qallunology — the study of white people — is not a new term, but it's back on my radar after a long while after this tongue-in-cheek article surfaced this month.
https://www.ammsa.com/publications/windspeaker/introducing-science-qallunology
Fever Ray, "What They Call Us"
I got to introduce this delightfully unsettling song on Anne Watt's Woman Wattage radio show last week. Office jobs, as I recall, are exactly like this.
