Sloth and Manatee

I made this letter for you while looking at a piece of glass, and you probably get to read it by looking at another piece of glass.

The piece of glass looks like something, it’s got pictures and words and video and even pretend conversations or real conversations with people who are not there. The people are somewhere else, probably doing something else. But we treat our piece of glass like it is people, and things. It is a window into something.

I can write or draw something and then go off somewhere, and someone else can look at it at their kitchen counter. That someone else experiences reading or looking right then and there, as if I am talking to them.

That is pretty marvelous. This is how books work. It is how records work.

There is other glass which we look through, like a window or a windshield. In this case, there are actual things over there on the other side that you might have to deal with. Like other cars that you don’t want to bump into.

Business says that the staring at the piece of glass is profitable, but that is not the point. It is a portal, if you use it that way.

A piece of music is real, it is some reality and truth that someone laid down so others can pick it up again and again. They said something true about How It Is, and we can share that by way of a screen or a player.

A record speaks from itself, it doesn’t list other records (unless it’s a diss track). It can be just you, and some true facts laid down by some artists. A bunch of records can tell a broad story about How It Is or How It Was for a city, a neighborhood, a musical form, a social issue, getting dumped, feeling all sorts of ways. A box of records at a yard sale carries a whole story about how it got assembled and how it got there. It’s an expression, not a replacement. It’s something that you encounter, and then incorporate into the multi-dimensional being/thread that is you.

So I’ll just acknowledge that I’m sitting here staring at a piece of glass, typing, and laying down some kind of something for you, that you can read, and then you can make some other something, and someone else can encounter that, and so on and so forth. We tell each other things, and send each other things, without replacing each other.

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Things Of The Week

Did I already share this? Probably. You can play it again!! It’s a game where you try to remember colors. Which feels in keeping with staring at a piece of glass.

Wow, there’s some really tremendous photography in this collection of women shaping visual storytelling

Hey, there’s a museum of glass in Corning, New York. It looks so groovy.

Okay! That's enough nonsense for now.

May you look right at something, may that something look right back at you, won't you be my neighbor? - Betsy