“An ability to affirm what is contingent and incoherent in oneself may allow one to affirm others who may or may not ‘mirror’ one’s own constitution.”
— Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (2005)

“Wherever we go, there seems to be only one business at hand – that of finding workable compromises between the sublimity of our ideas and the absurdity of the fact of us.”
― Annie Dillard, Teaching a Stone to Talk: Expeditions and Encounters

A nod to the NYPL Photo Collection and it’s inevitable surprises.

A handful of times this year I’ve been asked or had to provide a blurb about why/how I go about my arts journalism work. These are my latest thoughts on that.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about what the phrase “having it both ways” could really mean, curious as it is.

Recently I attended a two-day symposium leading up to the opening of an exhibition at the New Museum by Carlos Motta titled We Who Feel Differently. I wrote a piece for Hyperallergic about the symposium and the ideas behind it. The symposium focused not only on the question of how we embrace difference, but also pressed [...]

So I was recently in Costa Rica and stopped into a museum in the small town of Alajuela dedicated to Juan Santamaría, a national hero and a figurehead around which a part of Costa Rican national identity gathers. And as I learn more about Santamaría, I also, inevitably, came to learn about William Walker, a gentleman [...]

Maybe it’s because I’m a writer, but the number of times that “breast” and “vagina” have appeared in the news in the past month makes me wonder if people, and by “people” I mean “the government,” remember that those organs are actually attached to living human beings. These terms are so often being used in [...]

What contradictions there are in the world. Someone I care about very much is in a place that has been characterized by poverty, malnourishment, armed conflict, systematic rape, and years upon years of exploitation and oppression primarily by outsiders. And then there is this—the search for worlds and ideas far beyond ourselves. This slideshow, combined [...]

“Ambition, if it feeds at all, does so on the ambition of others.” -Susan Sontag I saw the above quote projected during a performance of Kristin Marting et al’s Lush Valley at HERE in September. It’s come up in my mind many times since then. I took this photograph while in residence at the Millay [...]

We’ve had a very rainy few days late this summer. But I can’t deny I love rainy days in the summer, most especially when I can spend some portion of them wandering around the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens, which is inevitably almost completely abandoned on such days. This Sunday, I spent a little over two hours [...]

I had this on the front of my web pages, some years ago. I love that image, and I love the sentiment in so many ways, so I decided to revisit this thought upon launching my new website, as I like linking it to those that came before. We should meet each morning, as from [...]

A Tribute to the Royer Family The Royer family is not my own, and the family pictured above is the not the Royer family of which I speak. However, I’d just like to extend this tribute on behalf of Royers everywhere and all the families that belong to them. The van is producing avocados. J [...]

“He speaks English in a rapid monotone, with lightly warped vowels; it’s an ideal delivery system for oracular pronouncements.” This statement was made about the architect Rem Koolhaas in an article written about his attempt to renovate the Hermitage in St. Petersburg, Russia, by Daniel Zalewski in the March 14, 2005 edition of The New [...]