“Why do we still fail to realise that difference adds depth and complexity, creating a more resilient system for all?”
Kyle Thomas Hemingway: The ephemera edit
An ongoing digital archive of 1,364 items (and counting) proving that I read, I saw, and I actually paid attention.
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Magazine
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“For the less zealous, a silent city may come with trade-offs. Enforced quiet—imposed, say, through city-wide regulations—is far from a cure-all. Not only would it limit activity and deflate the vitality of urban life, but it would inevitably shrink that third space between home and work. The street—the liminal zone of travel, meetups and play—would be reduced to quiet desolation.”
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“The lonely have often found comfort outdoors. In The Living Mountain, an unfussy meditation on Scotland’s Cairngorm mountains, Nan Shepherd writes: ‘Often the mountain gives itself most completely when I have no destination, when I reach nowhere in particular, but have gone out merely to be with the mountain as one visits a friend with no intention but to be with him.’”
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“Staying true to my guru’s ‘keep up’ imperative and quite recently having become a yoga teacher myself, I continued to teach through the production period, having a crew of yogis doing body drops and chanting ‘Har’ in our office even the night before we went to print. Why, you could ask, is keeping up so important? If you keep up a daily practice, you will eventually start to align. If you are aligned, things start to happen. Not to you, but for you.”
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“Fake bags can be understood as providing a commentary on the intricate history of cultural appropriation and commerce.”
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“Paper straws are still carbon- and energy-intensive to produce, and several types are not even recyclable, unlike their plastic counterparts. This is ecological gesture politics, in which a tiny concession (straws make up 0.025% of ocean plastics) precludes more meaningful sacrifices, such as giving up driving, flying or eating meat.”
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“Outlining historical connections in colour can only get you so far—there’s an element that’s missing if you don’t experience it in person. In honour of this, the exhibition is itself an exercise in experimenting with colour, with the Vitra Design Museum´s collection acting as the material that Marcelis is manipulating. The museum’s team are happy to give themselves up to this process, partly as it has allowed them to re-discover ‘objects that were previously virtually unknown or at least somewhat hidden,’ as Steinmüller describes it, and provide these objects with ‘the space to glow.’”
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“Cohen’s argument is not a pep talk that promises losers that ‘the only way is up.’ That way of thinking plays into the same unhelpful binary: By optimistically imagining a win on the horizon, we are still acting out our fear of loss. Instead, salvation lies in humility, which Cohen describes as ‘the consequence of an awareness that truth doesn’t belong to us.’ Like loss, humility is characterized by an absence: of pride, self-regard, entitlement. This absence humbles us when we lose, and when we win—as Cohen writes, ‘Humility reminds us of the large portion of arbitrariness that determines any personal success or failure.’”
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“Three hours later—some part of which I’d spent fearing for the life of the 76-year-old artist when he fell off a table during an extended force-feeding session—sat down with the two performers over red wine and pizza. I was grateful not only that Paul and Lilith had showered extensively before dinner, but also that the two—perhaps the greatest, most convincing, and most abysmally terrifying pair since Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton—were now in a state of absolute lightness. All the perturbance from that afternoon had evaporated. They seemed free and familiar, like 8-year-old best friends at a birthday party, and you could tell from the faces of the other dinner guests that their catharsis had clearly rubbed off.”
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“Like a time-capsule, the photographs of the interiors of the Nakagin Capsule Tower units—shot by Noritaka Minami over the course of many years—transport me back in time to the Tokyo of the 1970s, where I spent my childhood. More immediately, they take me slightly less further back, to a time eight years ago when I rented a unit in Tower B.”
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“Selling out is an accusation that is only leveled at certain artists. One Direction, Cher and Stephen King are immune from such critique. The notion of a sellout relies on the belief that particular artists owe something to their audiences or wider community; something that is incompatible with certain forms of commercial success. A change in style could be considered selling out, by switching your self-penned confessional folksy ballads for a synth-heavy pop sound, for instance, or by eschewing the art house cinema that built your reputation to direct a superhero movie.”
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“The promise of improved access and low-cost democratization sits uncomfortably alongside the fact that digital mental health has become a multibillion-dollar industry, according to an estimate by the American Psychiatric Association. Many of these apps are free, on the face of it, but at what cost?”
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“To not be able to go there for the opening is very difficult. On the other hand, it’s a building for the people of Hong Kong and it’s nice that they will be the most important people at the opening. This period is probably the first time in history where buildings are being opened without their architects present, and maybe that’s an opportunity. This is a strong sign to the community and the people of Hong Kong. ‘Here, this building is for you. Enjoy it.’”
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“I first saw the Bourse de Commerce, really saw it, in April of this year, but by that point I had been living in Paris for more than six years. I’d visited the Louvre of course, a minute or so stroll towards the river, and the Musée des Arts Decoratifs just down the street. I had seen shows at the Centre Pompidou, a few minutes to the east, and I had been, grudgingly, to the vast mall at Les Halles right next door many times when a trip to Muji was unavoidable. I’d even met friends after work at Iovine’s pizzeria one bitingly cold winter’s evening, almost directly opposite the Bourse’s grand entrance, but still, I’d never seen it. It was just one more pile of haughtily beautiful pale Parisian stonework that my eyes slid over and my brain failed to register.”
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“Filling personal spaces with purely decorative, cheaply made trinkets—or tchotchkes, knickknacks, bric-a-brac, junk—is as American as apple pie. ‘Over time, Americans have decided—as individuals, as members of groups, and as a society—to embrace not just materialism itself but materials with a certain shoddy complexion,’ writes author Wendy A. Woloson in her book Crap: A History of Cheap Stuff in America.”
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“Dance is associated with the emotional pinnacles of the human experience—love, joy, lust, art, insanity. Watching someone dance, or doing it ourselves, inspires emotions we struggle to access otherwise. This complicated relationship between movement and feeling is part of what makes us human. It makes sense, then, that artists and researchers working with robotics view the creation of a dancing robot as a meaningful tech frontier: How better to prove the skillful yet fundamentally unthreatening potential of humanoids than getting them to do the Mashed Potato?”
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“While some art forms seem well suited to be experienced in a digital format, furniture is a more challenging proposition—to state the obvious, its key function is to be physically used. The chairs we sit on, the desks we work at, the cupboards we store things in, the lamps we read by: while this transactional relationship is far from the only function furniture fulfils, it is the most common, even when furniture is sold at high prices at auction or via design galleries. Even Marc Newson’s Lockheed Lounge (the current record holder for the most expensive furniture object sold by a living designer at £2.4m) can be used for reclining—however tentatively one might choose to do so.”
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“The staples of the fashion industry have not been immune. The fashion show, the launch and the press trip: all have been cancelled or reconsidered, like so many other events.”
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“Learning to take responsibility is an essential part of growing up, no matter who you are, and how we respond when we’re confronted with our past misdeeds (including our digital ghosts) is a show of character. So apologizing, while uncomfortable and embarrassing, is never a bad thing, not really. What matters most is how we proceed going forward.”
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“Rituals are the bedrock of our sense-making in this world. According to Nick Hobson and his colleagues at the University of Toronto, they help us regulate emotions, our goal/performance states, and our connection to other people. From the outside, rituals could look irrational or non-functional, because they do not make ‘logical’ sense. But rituals tell a story that can help us make sense of something, and move past it.”
