This week has not been very good for sentence gathering. Partly, because I had to do a lot of sentence writing (results largely average, hopefully some approaching perfect) and partly because we were watching my partner’s home country of Lebanon get bombarded by the IDF. His parents and last remaining grandparent are currently holding up as best they can in Beirut but getting out isn’t currently an option (all flights are booked up into mid-October, and that assumes that the airport doesn’t get bombed). Escalation in Lebanon is of course only an extension of horrors that have been ongoing for nearly a year in both southern Lebanon and Gaza, but it does feel like an ominous turn.

I am grateful for the friends who have reached out and shown up in the last two weeks. Still working through the dissociation of it all and trying to show up. Sentence submissions highly appreciated as my own capacity for sentence gathering remains diminished.

PLAY INSECURITIES LIKE A PIANO.

Jenny Holzer truism

Via someone’s Instagram stories of visiting Holzer’s exhibition at the Guggenheim.

You know first stop is always instanbul.

Text message by Eric Adams from the federal indictment against him

Obviously the most perfect “sentence” (ha ha) would be a ruling that includes Adams never being allowed to run for office or operate in politics ever again, but I don’t know if a judge can actually impose that. God, I love when New Yorkers come together to talk shit about the mayor.

At about 60 seconds after I smoked this free base, I beheld every thought that was going on everywhere in the universe and all possible realities while I was wracked out with this horrible ruthless love.

a trip report from someone smoking 5-MeO-DMT, from the book TIHKAL: The Continuation by Alexander and Ann Shulgin

Submitted by Wesley with the comment “‘horrible ruthless love’ is just quite a turn of phrase.”

For all its many flaws, it’s too crazy and alive to ignore, or dismiss, or forget.

“Megalopolis Has Already Won”, Bilge Ebiri for New York magazine

Or worse: Western scientists destroying ancestral remains for anthropological “research.”

“At Indigenous Sacred Sites, Seeing Things I’m Not Supposed to See”, B. “Toastie” Oaster, for High Country News and Propublica

“Why is capitalism the only system feminism can exist within?” she asks the audience.

“The Wing Gets $75 Million to Expand Its Working Women Collective”, Riley Griffin for Bloomberg Businessweek

I’ve been working on a script for a RIP Corp episode about The Wing (the all-women co-working space that was briefly and somewhat improbably valued at hundreds of millions of dollars) and returning to 2016-2018 Discoursing about that company has been pretty maddening. This sentence is perfect insofar as it captures the particular brain worms of that era. Perfect like a Cronenberg movie body horror sequence. Perfect at giving me a headache.

This sentence is made all the more harrowing by the fact the person speaking in the sentence is journalist Rebecca Traister while promoting her 2018 book Good and Mad: The Revolutionary Power of Women’s Anger, and is presented in the story as though it was said in all sincerity and seriousness.

Wrangel considered that he had ‘crossed that fragile boundary that separates eccentricity from madness.’

Russia: Revolution and Civil War, 1917-1921, Antony Beevor

Via Talia Lavin posting excerpts on Bluesky.

We found ourselves at odds with the palace of language constructed to house us.

Statement from Eyebeam’s 2024 Fellows

Eyebeam is a New York based art and technology nonprofit whose residencies and fellowships have been career-transforming opportunities for many artists over its decades-long existence (including me—my book began as a residency project), but as an organization it’s floundered since losing its longtime space in Chelsea about a decade ago. I have a lot to say about the failings of the organization that are somewhat personal and might be better articulated elsewhere, but I will say that at this point I think it might be for the best if the organization dissolved entirely.

The 2024 fellows cohort, frustrated with leadership’s patronizing and incoherent response to an open letter asking the organization to commit to PACBI, decided to pivot away from working on their individual projects as fellows to instead collectively organize. They refused to present artwork as part of the end-of-program showcase. Instead, they made a collective “work” in the form of a video presenting a statement about the culture of silencing and manipulation perpetuated by Eyebeam’s leadership and board and the cohort’s shared commitment to Palestinian freedom.

I have a lot more to say about this and I expect the full statement will go online at some point; for now I’m just grateful to the fellows for their conviction.