Scotch brand telomere tape!
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Affected by lifestyle? Should I give up recreational huffing of radon?
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You should definitely be getting paid for that…
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Frosted Telomere Flakes, part of this complete breakfast!
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Pairs of disembodied hands move a simple dot-matrix print of “Disco Diva” Sylvester across an empty table. Even through the smudged print, Sylvester manages to still look glamorous and ethereal in this ACT UP/Los Angeles commemoration of the iconic singer’s life, made only a few years after his death in 1988 from complications from AIDS. This poster would be held by activists at protests as a physical memorial to a late artist, sometimes with a list of chants one could yell, including “AIDS is a disaster! Women die faster!” and “Healthcare is a right! Not just for the straight, male, white,” printed on the back.
The Sylvester print is just one of the many posters featured in ONE Archives Foundation’s new web-based exhibition Days of Rage , a curated archive of posters and smaller Xeroxed flyers spanning the early gay liberation movements of the 1970s to the safer sex public education campaigns of the mid-1990s. The exhibition, which launched on April 13, was curated by University of Southern California professor Andy Campbell and USC Curatorial Practices and the Public Sphere graduate students Tracy Fenix and Austen Villacis, who not only work with Campbell but have their own experiences in LGBTQ+ history, HIV/AIDS activism, and archival and digitization work.
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If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems and operations of 24/7 capitalism. In whatever endures of the world, the grid, as we live within it today, will have become a fractured and peripheral part of the ruins on which new communities and interhuman projects may possibly arise.
If we’re fortunate, a short-lived digital age will have been overtaken by a hybrid material culture based on both old and new ways of living and subsisting cooperatively. Now, amid intensifying social and environmental breakdown, there is a growing realization that daily life overshadowed on every level by the internet complex has crossed a threshold of irreparability and toxicity. More and more people know or sense this, as they silently experience its damaging consequences.
The digital tools and services used by people everywhere are subordinated to the power of transnational corporations, intelligence agencies, criminal cartels, and a sociopathic billionaire elite. For the majority of the earth’s population on whom it has been imposed, the internet complex is the implacable engine of addiction, loneliness, false hopes, cruelty, psychosis, indebtedness, squandered life, the corrosion of memory, and social disintegration. All of its touted benefits are rendered irrelevant or secondary by its injurious and sociocidal impacts.
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One thing that strikes me is that I don’t think we actually need to choose between these two approaches to post-colonialism. We can employ both in our approach to changing and decolonizing our thinking… I agree that we should focus on the material conditions of life, but that doesn’t mean that interrogating culture is unimportant. The two go hand-in-hand to reproduce particular ideologies in the world.
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I watched that a while ago. It’s very enlightening. I’m so glad she was willing to share her insights with the world. She didn’t have to do that, so I’m grateful.
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It really is. She’s an excellent public speaker as well.
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Great overview of catalytic converter theft in the context of crime, Chicago and capitalism.
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I had a friend welt two pieces of rebar around the catalytic converter on my truck. Two years later during a regular service the mechanic pointed out to me where someone had tried cutting through the exhaust at some point but gave up.
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Poet Andrea Gibson on losing the cloak of individualism:
"Don’t Let Anyone Say I Was The Best At Anything. It’s So Obnoxiously American”
A few months before my own diagnosis, my friend Liza died of cancer. Liza spent her entire life relentlessly committed to social justice and never stopped working for positive change. Throughout chemotherapy, frustrated that she wasn’t well enough to attend protests, Liza would sneak out at night to paint the names of women who had been murdered by police all over sidewalks and streets. At the celebration of her life, people Zoomed in from every corner of the world because that’s how far her activism reached. But when Liza was asked how she wanted to be remembered, she said, “Just don’t let anyone say I was the best at anything. It’s so obnoxiously American.” I laughed when I heard that as it’s nearly impossible to talk about Liza without saying she was the best at so much. But after I stopped laughing I found I was changed by her words.
I’d been committed to undoing my individualism for over a decade as I understood it to be sickness at the root of most of our planet’s suffering. I actively sought out teachers who spoke to the myth of separateness. I read Thích Nhất Hạnh and Angela Davis and anyone who could guide me towards a lens of interconnectedness. Over time, I lost most of my competitiveness, and began to relate to other people’s success as my own. Giving something to someone felt just like giving something to myself. I was more excited when my friends’ books came out than I was my own. There was so much added joy in my life as even the joy of strangers started to rush through my bloodstream.
But there were still snags. Still aches in my heart when someone won something I’d hoped to win. Still moments I’d notice a craving to be applauded for giving a shit. It wasn’t until Liza said what she said that the cloak of individualism really stopped fitting me. And then, when I was diagnosed with cancer myself, that thing fell to the ground and burned.
It burned because I saw something – I saw who I’d be after I died, and I saw that I wouldn’t be myself, but everyone. And in seeing that, I saw that I already was everyone. Not a body, but one cell in the body of the universe. I feel it so wholly now, I know whenever I die there is no possibility I will take anything this world needs with me to the other side—every unwritten poem will scatter like a seed and bloom in other people’s pens.
I share this as we begin #mentalhealthawareness month. I’ve been more at peace this year than any other year of my life, and I know that’s difficult for people to believe. “Who has the most peaceful year of their life during a cancer diagnosis?” I’m learning I’m not the only one.
It’s an extraordinary thing to know you are mortal, and to feel who you will be after you leave this world, and to know you already are that. It’s a portal to a kind of peace I never knew existed. It’s a portal to feeling at home in this world. And it’s a portal to compassion too. It’s very easy to show up to people when you are feeling, “I am them.”
I used to see “WE ARE ONE” bumper stickers and think, That’s a very nice (and very psychedelic) thought. But it’s not a thought at all. It’s a realization that I’m only beginning to learn how to speak about. I’ll keep sharing more words as they find their way to me. In the meantime, I must say, it is wonderful to be a cell beside all of you other cells in the body of the universe.
I’ll be sharing a number of longer posts about mental health this month in my newsletter. You can subscribe for free at link below. Thank you for being a part of the conversation, everyone.
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That’s lovely… thanks!
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Content Warning
This was a tough read for me as the accounts of others brought me back to a very dark time in my life that I don’t like to think about. So – if you’ve had these experiences, maybe skip this one.
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I appreciate the warning, not something I should be reading.
Since you did tho
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