June 28, 2017 · Individualism
Auguste Rodin Gates of Hell at Sunset (Stanford University)… To-day, artists and those who love artists seem like fossils. Imagine a megatherium or a diplodocus stalking the streets of Paris! There you have the impression that we must make upon our contemporaries. Ours is an epoch of engineers and of manufacturers, not one of artists.Auguste Rodin and Paul […]
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June 24, 2017 · Wanderlust
Look at this. Just… look at this. Lindsey… The kind of beautiful that makes you forget what you were going to say. Natural, unforced, the real thing. And Sharka, with those soulful eyes, gorgeous in that way only dogs who’ve been loved properly and know it can be. Cheap wine in the coastal Bonny Doon […]
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June 21, 2017 · Individualism
Resistance: Ars Technica editors Annalee Newitz and Joe Mullin sit down with UC Santa Cruz sociology professor Lindsey Dillon to talk about how the Trump administration has been ripping scientific and environmental data off the Web, page by page, dataset by dataset, decades of hard-won public knowledge memory-holed in broad daylight while we all sat […]
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June 13, 2017 · Resistance
The Fifth Circle Interstate 5. The great American scar tissue running through California’s gut. You want to know what we are? What we’ve become? It’s all right here, stretched out under that merciless Central Valley sun for mile after goddamn mile. You smell them before you see them. That’s the thing nobody tells you. The […]
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June 12, 2017 · Wanderlust
Here’s the thing about Burden’s forest of castiron streetlamps standing there like some municipal graveyard outside LACMA: it’s the kind of gorgeous, stupid, absolutely necessary gesture that makes you want to laugh and weep simultaneously. Two hundred and two vintage lampposts salvaged from the gutted streets of Los Angeles, arranged in rows like soldiers who’ve […]
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May 29, 2017 · Engineering
John Warren Travis’ Design for Oedipus Rag There’s something absolutely primal, something that cuts through all the academic horseshit, about staging Sophocles in a chapel at Fort Mason. I’ve seen Greek tragedy done in every godforsaken venue from The Ancient Theatre of Epidaurus to prosceniums that smell like 1950s cigarettes to black box theaters where […]
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May 23, 2017 · Collusion
I’ve seen a lot of weird shit in sacred spaces, but Aleta Hayes’ Chocolate Heads turning Stanford’s Memorial Church into some kind of Byzantine hallucination hits different when that same building held my father’s memorial service. When my brother, who hated Stanford with a kind of pure contempt that honestly scared me, inexplicably chose to […]
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