Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit

“Men, she suggested, should stop looking at clothes as signifiers of gender and class and just enjoy them.”

“It strikes me that the glory of art is the glory of survival, for survival is an inhuman property. It is an attribute of mountains and objects, of the worthless toys in the children’s bedroom at home that will outlive us all. That which is human decays and disappears, only in art does the quality of humanity favor survival. Only in art is a record kept of an instant, that the next instant does not erase.”

“Do you know what a cliché is? It’s a story so fine and thrilling that it’s grown old in its hopeful retelling.”

“Queerness is the pursuit of happiness embodied. Queerness is the pursuit of happiness registered as both a necessity and a virtue. Queerness is the statement—sexual, aesthetic, intellectual, and affective—that one’s happiness belongs to oneself and must be pursued as such.”

This edition elaborates understandings of the party by considering the hidden, the invisible, and the underground as material and imaginary forces, where partying is not only festive and excessive, but manifests in forms of social and political organizing, cultural and subcultural conversation, the maintenance of safe spaces and the building of parallel structures against established institutional forms.

“What Elsie Mendl had was something else that’s particularly American—an appreciation of vulgarity. Vulgarity is a very important ingredient in life. I’m a great believer in vulgarity—if it’s got vitality. A little bad taste is like a nice splash of paprika. We all need a splash of bad taste—it’s hearty, it’s healthy, it’s physical. I think we could use more of it. No taste is what I’m against.”

“The question is not if design will remain a viable profession in post-industrial societies, but for how long.”

“The history of the Broadway musical is the history of short Jewish men yelling at each other.”

“I don’t think the cure for loneliness is meeting someone, not necessarily. I think it’s about two things: learning how to befriend yourself and understanding that many of the things that seem to afflict us as individuals are in fact a result of larger forces of stigma and exclusion, which can and should be resisted.”

“Sometimes we do things, without thinking, that make no sense to us until much later, and yet appear to have been prompted by the most alert part of our being.”