Elsewhat

A paint off at the Mural street art festival. MC Baldassari vs. Jason Wasserman.

Strobe Warning!

Another in my series of abstract video pieces for a potential upcoming project.

A short book on the importance of connection through creativity, from London-based poet, novelist, and musician Kae Tempest. A recurring theme is how hard creative work is, but but doing it and sharing it is important in being open and connected to humanity.

The following excerpt mentions writing, but I think it applies equally to any creative endeavour:

To write is to fail. An idea is a perfect thing that comes to the writer in a breathless dream. The writer holds this idea in their mind. In their body. Everything feeds it. They’ve spent their entire lifetime up until that point, honing their skills to get this idea out of the aether, and down through their useless hands, onto the page. But it will never be right. There is no way that a writer cannot injure that idea as they wrestle with it.

The recurring theme of failure in this book is strangely encouraging and empowering.

By the time it has revealed itself to be finished, when the deadline can’t be put off any longer, the exhausted writer has learned another lesson about their own restrictions, that they promise themselves they will overcome next time. But next time comes, and they’re faced with new restrictions, new limitations, new impossibilities. Finishing work is what gives the artist the humility necessary to begin again.

Brutal and honest.

Spotted this little paste-up by street artist Labrona.

Been listening to Braids new album Euphoric Recall on repeat the last few days.

This message was tied to the fence around a beautiful park building that burned down, and which someone apparently thought the municipal government was being overly slow to fix.

This audiobook, wonderfully produced by my friend Julia Scott, explores many facets of voice and vocal performance from the point of view of a voice actor and performer. Engaging, charming, and fun.

Inside Voice unpacks the writer-director-producer-actor’s obsession with voice and all its permutations. It takes us on a journey to discover how this vital piece of our identity serves as an x-ray of our personal histories. Bell explored the power of voice in her critically-acclaimed and award-winning film, In a World, which she wrote, directed, and starred in. With this audiobook, she dives back into the rabbit hole to deliver a fun, whip-smart exploration of the psychology, social science, cultural constructs, and mechanics of our voices.

What I love about this book, above all else, is that it can only exist in an audio format. The reading and performance would not translate to the written word. At all.

Rating: A

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Found while walking the back alleys of Montréal.

Once a year, the Bulgarian tradition of Kukeri unites a small village as residents wear intricate masks and costumes and dance at night. Killian Lassablière chronicles the practice in his short documentary.

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As is my custom these past couple weeks, I went to see a design exhibit in the last few days of its run. The previous was W.E.B. Dubois at The Cooper Hewitt in New York City. This time it was a women in design exhibit at Montréal’s Musée des Beaux Arts—Parall(Elles).

Organized in collaboration with the Stewart Program for Modern Design, this major exhibition celebrates the instrumental role women have played in the world of design through a rich corpus of art works and objects dating from the mid-19th century onwards. In addition, it examines the reasons why women are underrepresented in the history of this discipline and encourages an expanded understanding of what constitutes design.

Chaise Sauvage by Jay Sae Jung Oh

Exploded Chair by Joyce Lin

On until May 28, 2023.